Dispatches from the home front: Violet Hunt as war writer and reluctant modernist

ABSTRACT

The life and work of Violet Hunt showcases the tension between modernism's challenges to Victorian and Edwardian literary and social traditions, and the conservatism, particularly with regard to gender norms, of many of the modernist canon's key figures: institutions, writers and critics alike. Although her work was well-regarded during her lifetime, and she was a central figure in London's literary scene in the early-twentieth century, Hunt is now best known for her long, and ultimately disastrous, relationship with Ford Madox Ford. Her copious literary oeuvre, comprising seventeen novels, three collections of short stories, and several works of biography, translation and criticism, is now largely neglected. Hunt's exclusion from the modernist canon mirrors that of many other women writers of the period; however, Hunt's “recovery” remains a difficult case. Her numerous affairs, suffragettism, blending of Victorian, Edwardian and modernist styles, and authorial focus on the lives of women, all challenge conventional cultural and literary categories. Yet Hunt's work, especially during and after World War I, is important, as it offers an alternative not only to the male-centric war canon, but also to more traditional understandings of modernism, which is often presented as a break from the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Women's writing
• World War I
• modernism
• literary canon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some of the anthologies that have done important recuperative work, but have excluded Hunt, include: Tate, Women, Men and the Great War; Higonnet, Lines of Fire; Cardinal et al., Women's Writing on the First World War; Korte, “Introduction”. Although not an anthology, Debra Rae Cohen's Remapping the Home Front is one of the few texts that acknowledges Hunt as a war writer in her own right.

2 Belford, Violet, 221, 236.

3 Goldring, South Lodge, 118. Goldring puts Hunt's reaction to the war in sharp contrast to Ford's, who he writes saw war as an escape from both Hunt and the controversy surrounding his German heritage and naturalization. With the outbreak of the war, Ford immediately signed up, first writing two propaganda books for the Ministry of Information and then, in 1915, joining the Third Battalion of the Welch Regiment (116–17).

4 In the introduction to Women's Writing on the First World War, Cardinal et al. explicitly call out the masculinity of the World War I canon: “The male canon, while not directly inimical to women's writing about the war, often seems oblivious of its existence, let alone its claims to significance” (5).

5 Higonnet, Lines of Fire, xx.

6 Buck, “British Women's Writing of the Great War,” 88.

7 See: Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart.

8 Guillory, “Canon,” 240.

9 Einhaus, “Modernism, Truth and the Canon of First World War Literature,” 299–300.

10 Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 6; Gilbert et al., No Man's Land, 265.

11 Gilbert et al., No Man's Land, 279.

12 Campbell, “Combat Gnosticism,” 203.

13 Ibid.

14 Hynes, A War Imagined, xii.

15 Hynes also writes that there are no canonical pieces of war literature written between 1919 and 1926: it took almost 10 years for writers to be able to imagine the war (423). Hunt, then, with her 1918 epistolary novel, and her 1925 short stories, was in some senses before her time in offering these depictions of the war.

16 Victoria Margree argues that Hunt uses the uncanny to show the total disruption that the war brought to domestic life in England. See: “Haunted Modernity in the Uncanny Stories of May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt,” 180.

17 Hunt, “The Cigarette Case of the Commander,” 37–69. Cited in text as CCC.

18 Hunt, The Last Ditch. Cited in text as LD.

19 Hunt, “Love's Last Leave,” 71–123. Cited in text as LLL.

20 Although Venice's repeated failure to find war work is meant to be humorous, it also illustrates just how varied jobs were for women on the home front.

21 Higonnet, Lines of Fire, xxii.

22 Belford, Violet, 239–40. During the war, Hunt also worked on the connective material that joined Ford's stories together in Zeppelin Nights. Belford writes that the stories were intended to “fortify readers against the threat of German zeppelins flying overhead” (221). See also: Cohen, Remapping the Home Front for a discussion of Zeppelin Nights.

23 Venice's distance from the war is also a mark of her aristocratic privilege, which Hunt is critical of throughout the novel. Hunt's portrayal of Venice as excited to see the Zeppelins and the resulting war damage is unflattering.

24 Higonnet, Lines of Fire, xx, xxii.

25 It is worth noting that Hunt wrote these war stories after her breakup with Ford, during which time she sought solace from her women friends: Rebecca West, Radclyffe Hall, May Sinclair, Ethel Colburn Maybe and Dorothy Richardson (Belford 230, 251). Therefore, there is a potential biographical influence on Hunt's choice of women protagonists and dead or injured men.

26 Hynes, A War Imagined, 329.

27 Korte, “Introduction”, viii.

28 Gilbert et al., No Man's Land, 264.

29 DeKoven, Rich and Strange, 4.

30 In “The Cigarette Case of the Commander,” Elizabeth is also a frustrated writer who can no longer find a place to publish her work due to the war: “She herself had been able to write quite good stories in the old days and get them into magazines, but now, somehow, she could not, she was old-fashioned, people didn't want her stuff, and she could make no money” (CCC 46).

31 Hunt, “Preface,” 3–17.

32 Einhaus, “Modernism, Truth, and the Canon of First World War Literature,” 298.

33 Hynes, A War Imagined, 457.

34 Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War, 4.

35 Ibid., 5.

36 Hynes, A War Imagined, 457.

37 Ibid., xiii.

38 See: Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 227–31. Ford explicitly calls attention to the propaganda that swirled around the sinking of the Lusitania in his 1929 novel No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction.

39 Higonnet, Lines of Fire, xxiii.

40 Ibid., xxx.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa Dinsman

Melissa Dinsman is Assistant Professor of English at York College-CUNY and author of Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II (2015). Her research focuses on WWII women writers, the politics of the domestic, and information networks. Dinsman is currently at work on her next book project, which explores the ways British women writers sold WWII to the American public. Some of Dinsman's recent work can be found in ELN, Women's Writing, Modernism/modernity Print+, and the Teaching Modernist Women's Writing in English collection. She currently serves as co-President of the Space Between society.

Heather Robinson

Heather Robinson is Professor of English at York College-CUNY. Her research explores feminist issues in academic administration, and the linguistic implications of diasporic movement and home-making. Her most recent book, an interdisciplinary study entitled Language, Diaspora, Home: Identity and Women's Space-Making in is forthcoming from Routledge Press, and she has also written articles and book chapters that appear in, for example, the Journal of Basic Writing, Administrative Theory and Praxis, and Teaching American Speech. She teaches canon formation and post-colonial language and literature, and is co-author, with Melissa Dinsman, of the essay “Connection Failure: War, Spiritualism, and Communications Media in Violet Hunt's 'Love's Last Leave,” (Women's Writing, 2022).