Women writers and the Great War

Such esteemed writers as Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf can be counted among the women writing about World War I. But more ordinary writers were also compelled to write about the war, revisiting their often extraordinary wartime experiences - as nurses, ambulance drivers, munitions workers, and more. In Women Writers and the Great War, Dorothy Goldman, Jane Gledhill, and Judith Hattaway explore the literary, social, and psychological themes that emerge from the writings on the war by women from all walks of life. Diaries, letters, newspaper and magazine pieces, short stories, and novels document their powerful and complex response to what remains one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history. . The authors of Women Writers and the Great War argue that it is to a large extent women's exclusion from the trenches that has resulted in their exclusion from the canon of war literature. Even to this day, scant critical attention has been paid to the wide range of women's writing on the war. What can be found there are not only valuable eye-witness accounts of history but literary history in the making. Examining the work of many women writers from Great Britain and the United States, the authors look at the way in which they devised an appropriate literary form, the extent to which their identity as women shaped the content and style of their work, the extent to which that work does - and does not - fit into the literary history of the period, and whether these women can be said to share a common literary voice.