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sacrifice of the masculine body during the early years of the First World War, and
latterlyupon sceptical appraisals of such values, war poetry allowed for little more
than a peripheral female space, and that defined by men. The archetypal woman’s
war poem is, perhaps, Vera Brittain’s ‘To My Brother’, the opening line of which
gives Reilly’s first anthology its title. It is a poem about a woman’s response to male
experience. ‘Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,’^1 it begins, appropriating
the marks of war but subordinating the writer’s experience to that of the soldier.
Borrowed knowledge was always a weakness in a poetry validated like no other by
actually havingbeen there. The misogyny in the work of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried
Sassoon was not only an expression of personal antipathy, but was also part of a
developing politics and poetics of exclusive knowledge. Extreme experience became
a pre-condition of writing war poetry, and the primacy of action and military
involvement established by the most influential poets of the Great War has never
quite been shaken off. War poetry anthologists might agree that there should be
something like a balanced representation of gender, but the persistent descriptors of
their subject-matter tend to mean that women are at best reservists in the final draft.
Scholars of women’s war writing contested this aesthetic of combat by emphas-
izing a body of work that explored the changes in women’s social experience during
wartime—what Claire Tylee calls their ‘entry into that exclusive part of the national
culture which had previously been forbidden to women’.^2 For these critics, women’s
war writing describes and reflects the ways in which the social and cultural changes
of the First and Second World Wars made available ‘all that area of public privilege
and power to which men had access, and women did not, such as politics, the
professions, skilled industrial work, sexual adventure’.^3 The ‘entry’ of that writing
into a reorganized canon of war literature was a means by which that national
culture could be seen whole, and not as exclusively defined by the aesthetic of male
trauma that had so emphatically shaped a public sense of war poetry in anthologies,
editions, and school textbooks after the Second World War. Yet women’s poetry
remained stubbornly resistant to this process of reappraisal. Whilst Reilly’s and
other anthologies were useful in suggesting the extent and variety of women’s verse,
they finally lacked poets as challenging as Wilfred Owen, David Jones, or Keith
Douglas, or, indeed, as prose writers like Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen. They
(^1) Vera Brittain, ‘To My Brother’, in Catherine Reilly (ed.),Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry
and Verse of the First World War 2 (London: Virago, 1981), 15.
Claire Tylee,The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in
Women’s Writing, 1914–64(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 14.
(^3) Ibid. See also Dorothy Goldmann (ed.),Women and World War 1: The Written Response
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993); Agn`es Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman, and Judith Hattaway (eds.),
Women’s Writing on the First World War(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Angela K.
Smith,The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War(Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000).