Cirrus@Austlit

'A critical reading of sexually radical fiction by British women in the years during and after World War I. Gay Wachman examines work by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf and Radclyffe Hall, along with the less well known Clemence Dane, Rose Allatini and Evadne Price. These writers, she states, created a modernist literary tradition -one that functioned both within and against the repressive ideology of the British Empire. Wachman places at the centre of this alternative tradition Sylvia Warner's achievement in undermining the inhibitions that faced women writing about forbidden lesbian love. She discusses Warner's use of crosswriting - the transposing of "unrepresentable" lesbian lives into narratives about gay men - as a means of transgressing borders of race, class and gender. She then connects Warner's oppositional feminist politics and literary practice to the work of other writers who struggled against imperialist sexual ideology. Whether following Dane's reflection of this compulsory repression in "Regiment of Women" through to its subversion in Warner's "The True Heart", or in discussing explorations of the closet by Allatini, Woolf and Warner, Wachman demonstrates how these women challenged the codes of expression on which imperialist patriarchy and capitalism depended.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I would like to ground it historically by examining the ways that these characters construct their gendered identities as negotiations between the official British discourse of gender during World War I (which can be examined in propaganda and the popular press) and their own lived experience. Although these texts draw directly from diaries written during the First World War, we must also recognize that they were published in the 1930s; therefore, I will also explore the ways they negotiate with the official discourse of gender in postwar Britain (which draws from postwar social policy and the canonization of the soldier poets' work). In doing so, I will be looking both at the moments of gender confusion, as well as the arguments these moments are making. To this end, I will draw upon the theories of Michel de Certeau to argue that these writers include such moments in their texts in order to challenge the intersecting rhetorics of war and gender.'

Source: p.272.

'Two novels by and (though not exclusively so) about women, one in English and one in German, both written in 1930, and neither in the remotest sense partisan, offer a negative view of the war from the stand- point of those involved at the Western Front. Interest in the two novels is justified for a variety of reasons: both present the war from a particular viewpoint, that of the bourgeois young woman, who, in serving with the Red Cross, comes to see behind the scenes of war, and thus to reject it completely. Each work mirrors the moral and social changes brought about by the war and which had such a profound effect on the position of women in the present century; and each goes beyond this aspect to present the concept of the lost generation found in so many of the novels written around 1930. Both works, finally, have a link with Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues: Evadne Price's "Not So Quiet . . .", published under the name of the first-person narrator, "Helen Zenna Smith", patently uses the title of A. W. Wheen's translation of Remarque, and follows the most famous of First World War novels in other ways, though by no means as slavishly as has been suggested. Adrienne Thomas' Die Katrin wird Soldat was first published by Ullstein under the Propylaen imprint used for Im Westen nichts Neues and is close in tone and in some respects in style to Remarque, though it is not overtly modelled upon his novel. Both works have been neglected by criticism, perhaps more on grounds of literary snobbery than real obscurity.' (from p.57)