Women’s Writing in the Second World War

Abstract

The Second World War is seldom regarded as a ‘literary’ war: its dominant images come from the cinema and newsreels, rather than from poetry or prose, and it is hard to identify a ‘canon’ of either male or female war writing. As many writers acknowledged at the time, the sheer immensity of the conflict — its geographical extent, political complexity, and human scale — resisted interpretation or summation. While the press called for literary mobilization, repeatedly asking ‘where are the war poets?’, writers themselves were asking what, after World War One and the Spanish Civil War, could possibly be left for the war writer to say?¹