‘many sisters to many brothers’ First World War poetry has functioned. The lack of ‘a single, coherent vision of
lifeon the home front’^17 problematizes both the valorization and the demarcation
of the figure of the ‘war poet’. There were more than 500 women writing and
publishing poetry during the war, but most of them resist the easy designation of
‘war poet’. From Teresa Hooley’s ‘A War Film’, which details the new ‘telecom-
municating’ of war by cinema—‘As in a dream|Still hearing machine-guns rattle
and shells scream,|I came out onto the street’^18 —to Jessie Pope’s ‘War Girls’,
which recounts how women had taken over traditionally masculine employment
opportunities—‘There’s the girl who clips your ticket for the train,|And the girl
who speeds the lift from floor to floor’^19 —to Mary H. J. Henderson’s ‘An Incident’,
which engages with the tropes of the young male sacrifice—‘And the boy turned
whenhiswoundsweredressed,|Helduphisfacelikeachildatthebreast’^20 —these
poems do not sit easily within any one kind of war experience, and thus cannot
be easily categorized. Although this poetry may have been written by a certain
segment of the population—one which was largely based on class, education,
and wealth—it is not reasonable to assume that it is all the same sort of poetry:
‘ ‘‘Women in the First World War’’ are often referred to as though they are a clearly
defined, coherent group. It cannot be reiterated too often that the experiences of
women differed dramatically between geographical areas, trades, age groups and
classes.’^21 It is this lack of conformity to the insistence on (masculine) unanimity
of experience during the war to which I will now turn.
Women Writing War
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The war offered women a creative space in which to engage with these new identities;
as Ouditt argues, the war allowed women to ‘work, think and practise as artists’.^22
However, this notion of the woman artist must also be understood within the
context of class—if private wealth meant that middle-class women had the luxury
of volunteering their services, then it also meant that they had the luxury of time to
write, a luxury not possible for the hundreds of thousands of working-class women
war workers. Indeed, thelackof luxury—that is, luxury of a material kind—is often
referenced in women’s war poems as a way of demonstrating both a break with the
past and an acknowledged sacrifice. In Helen Dircks’s ‘After Bourlon Wood’ there
(^17) Ibid.
(^18) Teresa Hooley, ‘A War Film’, in Catherine Reilly (ed.),The Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry
and Verse(London: Virago, 1997), 56.
(^19) Jessie Pope, ‘War Girls’, ibid. 90. (^20) Mary H. J. Henderson, ‘An Incident’, ibid. 52.
(^21) Gail Braybon, ‘Women and the War’, in Stephen Constantine, Maurice W. Kirby, and Mary B.
Rose (eds.), 22 The First World War in British History(London: Arnold, 1995), 145.
Ouditt,Fighting Forces, Writing Women, 217.