Women Writers and the Great War

The authors of Women Writers and the Great War argue that it is to a large extent women's exclusion from the trenches that has resulted in their exclusion from the canon of war literature. Even to this day, scant critical attention has been paid to the wide range of women's writing on the war. What can be found there are not only valuable eye-witness accounts of history but literary history in the making. Examining the work of many women writers from Great Britain and the United States, the authors look at the way in which they devised an appropriate literary form, the extent to which their identity as women shaped the content and style of their work, the extent to which that work does - and does not - fit into the literary history of the period, and whether these women can be said to share a common literary voice.