Memoirs of a Generation

Abstract

In No Time Like the Present, published in 1933, Storm Jameson wrote of herself as essentially a survivor of the Great War. Discussing what was being written from 1929 onwards she claimed that the only literature of any value that her generation would have to leave would be its war books. Their final value would be that they conveyed ‘experience … that involved the whole self — of that time in the writer’s life when he was most sharply alive’ (Jameson, 1933: 149). (With fine judgement, she instanced The Middle Parts of Fortune, Undertones of War, The Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. These have indeed come to be considered an important part of our literary heritage.) It is curious that she assumed the authors of war books to be men, despite recognising that women were also affected by the War: women too, experienced ‘the impalpable excitement fiddling on our nerves’. Yet, paying the inevitable tribute, which entailed the downgrading of women’s lives, she explained in passing why the account of women’s experience would be of less value: the war pressed more lightly on women ‘(we were not soldiers)’.