The second battlefield

This text explores written representations of First World War experience, produced by a variety of different women and investigates the interface between such writing and the development of literary modernisms, focusing on an engagement with issues of gender which remains topical today. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material in the form of diaries and letters, the book examines the way in which the variety of new roles undertaken by women triggered a search, conscious or otherwise, for appropriate new forms of expression. The experimental impressions produced on the private page are traced through to the public world of fiction, as women used the subject of war to direct their writing, often with radical artistic consequences. Through the twin approaches of literary criticism and historical exploration, the book contributes a new strand to the scholarship of women and war, as well as expanding current notions of how modernisms should be defined, providing a tool for students of literature, history and women's studies as well as enthusiasts of the First World War.