Female Maladies? Reappraising Women's Popular Literature of the First World War

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Notes

¹Nevertheless, William: An Englishman was republished by Persephone Books in 1999.

²Brittain's poem, ‘The War Generation: Ave’, which she used as epigraph to her first chapter of Testament of Youth.

³Dorothy Sayers's Unnatural Death was first broadcast on BBC Radio from 5 May to 16 June 1975.

⁴Ben Shephard, ‘Writing about Modern War’, paper presented at a ‘Writing War’ seminar, Queen Mary's University, London, 23 November 2005.

⁵It is worth repeating here that Owen's poetry was not widely read until the 1960s, encouraging later literary works to add a more sexualized dimension to relationships between men.

⁶Philip Larkin, ‘MCMXIV’, in The Whitsun Weddings, London: Faber and Faber, 1964.

⁷The developments in trauma studies throughout the century are extensive. To integrate them fully into this paper would skew it towards a historical/psychological reading and remove the focus on literary depiction, which has proved the one most resilient in the popular mind.

⁸For example, the war has been the exclusive subject of AQA'a synoptic English Literature A-Level paper, in which students evaluate fictional sources for their relative validity.