The Virago Book of Women and the Great War

Description

Joyce Marlow presents a varied collection of women's writing on the Great War drawn from diaries, newspapers, letters and memoirs from across Europe and the States. Starting with material from 1914, she outlines the pre-war campaigns for suffrage and then the demand from women eager to be counted amongst those in action. Contemporary accounts and reports describe their experience on the field and reactions to women in completely new areas, such as surgery as well as on the home front. The words of women in the UK, America, France and Germany display a side to the war rarely seen. Familiar voices such as those of Vera Brittain, Millicent Fawcett, May Sinclair, Alexandra Kollontai, the Pankhurst family and Beatrice Webb, as well as the unknown, make this anthology a guide to the female experience of a war after which women's lives would never be the same.

Joyce Marlow's fascination with the Great War was fostered by her father who had served as a self-styled 'lance-private' of the Manchester Regiment. Her interest in the female experience of the same war was sparked when she read Vera Brittain's TESTAMENT OF YOUTH. She is from Manchester originally.

'Fascinating ... these first-person female memories are social history at its most compelling' SCOTSMAN 'What emerges most strongly, and much more clearly than ever before from this wonderfully lively and engaging anthology is the extraordinary diversity of the occupations adopted by women' Mark Bostridge, TLS 'A true labour of love' Kate Figes, WOMAN'S JOURNAL 'An interesting and well-chosen selection of contemporary accounts.' LITERARY REVIEW