‘It is not the place of women to talk of mud’: Some Responses by British Women Novelists to World War 1

Abstract

Women, it seems, could farm the land (the mother country); they could make bandages, knit or nurse; but the mud of the trenches should be left to those who understand such matters. In time of war men should be left to get on with the fighting and after the war they are the appropriate people to write about it. As Judith Kazantzis asked wearily in her introduction to Scars upon my Heart, an anthology of World War 1 poetry by women, ‘Is there among men, not excluding the editors of war-poetry anthologies, the atavistic feeling that war is man’s concern, as birth is woman’s; and that women quite simply cannot speak on the matter?’² Although she dismissed this attitude as nonsense, Hager and Taylor’s bibliography of World War 1 fiction³ published in the same year, 1981, listed only 50 novels by women out of the 700 war novels published between 1913 and 1935; and an even more recent book, The Penguin Anthology of World War 1 Prose, edited by Jon Glover and Jon Sillcin,⁴ does not make one feel that much has changed.

Novels by women with the ‘Great War’ as subject are not numerous. In the best of them the authors have wisely pictured events at home or at any rate far from the front… really, it is not the place of women to talk of mud; they may leave that to men, who knew more about it.¹