‘A Tribute to my Brother’: Women's Literature and its Post-war Ghosts

Abstract

This paper analyses the ways in which a selection of influential, middle-class women mourned their brothers’ deaths through their writing. Some, inspired by the ghost of their lost brother, self-consciously set out to create and mould the written account of women's suffering in war; others were solely interested in the creative and regenerative effect of the dead brother's presence in their own work, sublimating their own guilt at survival into an impulse to write. Vera Brittain, Katherine Mansfield, Rose Macaulay, and Cicely Hamilton contributed in fiction and autobiography to what we might describe as a specifically female memory of the war, focussed through their depictions of their brothers’ deaths. Their writing, particularly in Brittain's case, has played a considerable part in the formation of the sense of the ‘lost generation’ of the 1920s, which in turn has shaped later perceptions of the war. However, a detailed examination reveals that when these women's writings are read alongside each other, a more troubling and complex picture emerges—we find bizarre manifestations of guilt and grief, and a sense of a mourning that is forbidden and incomplete, revealing itself through hallucination, haunting, and possession. Their narratives speak of the very particular complexity of survival for women, who, in the post-war years, must somehow reconcile their mourning with their own continuing creativity and achievements in the space left by their lost brothers and lovers.

Keywords:

• Brittain
• Mansfield
• Macaulay
• Hamilton
• brother
• guilt
• mourning

Notes

1 For a detailed discussion of the ways in which individual memory shapes collective ‘mythologizing’ of the war, see Todman, 2005; see also Watson, 2007.

2 It was an international success, capturing the imagination of a transatlantic public as well as in Britain. On publication in America a month after being launched in Britain, Testament of Youth sold 11,000 copies on the first day.

3 Stories such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ return to her New Zealand childhood in the light of her brother's death (see Smith, 2002).

4 The date is not recorded.

5 The late-eighteenth-century Gothic is a strongly female-influenced body of literature. Ellen Moers coins the term the ‘female Gothic’ (1976).

6 Sylvia Townsend Warner's story ‘A Love Match’ was first published in A Stranger with a Bag, 1966. There is no record of the specific date of the story (Reproduced in: Tate, 1997).

7 See Woolf, 1993 ed., Chapters III and IV for a contemporary and highly influential discussion of this.

8 Philip Slaveney's Perspectives on Hysteria traces hysteria throughout the last century moving from a state induced by a change in status or shock such as bereavement, to an organic weakness that pre-disposes the patient to suffer from it (1990).

9 For the most contemporary discussion of hysteria, see Micale (1995).

10 For further discussion of the manipulation and emergence of myth in wartime, see Buitenhuis (1987), also Gregory (2008: 63–69).

11 This was the 1968 collection of essays entitled Promise of Greatness, ed. George. A. Panichas, University of Maryland, to which Brittain was the only woman asked to contribute, alongside Edmund Blunden, Gerald Brenan, Robert Graves, L. P. Hartley, and R. C. Sherriff.

12 Sir William Haley, under pseudonym Oliver Edwards, in an article in The Times, quoted by Brittain in ‘War Service in Perspective’, p. 191.