Women’s Fiction and the Great War

The essays in this volume on women’s writing of the First World War are written from an explicitly theoretical and academic feminist perspective. The contributors - including a number of female academics - challenge current thinking about women’s responses to the First World War and explore the differences between women writers of the period, thus questioning the very categorization of ‘women’s writing’. The Great War stimulated a sudden growth in the novel industry. Well known writers such as Mrs Humphrey Ward and Edith Wharton found themselves jostled by authors like Ruby M. Ayres, Kate Finzi, and Olive Dent. The trauma of the war continued to reverberate through much of the fiction published in the years that followed its inglorious end. This volume considers some of the best known, and some of the least known, women writers on whose work the war left its shadow. The writing of some of the most famous ‘modernist’ women writers - including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and H. D. - is reassessed as war literature, and the work of long-neglected authors such as Vernon Lee, Frances Bellerby, and Mary Butts is given serious attention for the first time.