stacy gillis
(1977) and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’sTheMadwoman in the Attic: The
Women Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination(1979) was crucial
in the gendered reconsideration of literary history, broadening its perspective
to include women’s writing. Since then, both the representation of women in
literature and the works of women writers have come under increasing scrutiny.
Nosheen Khan’sWomen’s Poetry of the First World War(1988), Claire M. Tylee’s
The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood
in Woman’s Writings, 1914–1964(1990), Dorothy Goldman’s collectionWomen
and World War 1: The Written Response(1993), Sharon Ouditt’sFighting Forces,
Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War(1994), and Trudi
Tate and Suzanne Rait’s collectionWomen’s Fiction and the Great War(1997) are
the best-known examples of the research which has emerged on women and the
First World War in the last twenty-five years. Ouditt summarizes the ways in which
the war opened up opportunities for women which had previously existed only for
those located within a particular confluence of class and wealth:
[T]he war, even if it was a manifestation of a particularly brutal kind of masculine madness,
created space for women to work, think and practise as artists. It helped to reveal the futility
of a social and political pact that made men and women play infantile games with each
other, and to over-invest in definitions of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ which rendered the
bond unbreakable.^14
These works have all dissected the relationship between gender politics, aesthetics,
and the war, identifying how women could and did respond to the war in ways
which moved beyond traditional expectations. To be considered alongside these
works is the only anthology of women’s First World War poetry, Catherine Reilly’s
Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War(1981).^15
The publication of this work and the fact that women’s war poetry is the sole
subject of Khan’s work are indications of the range and depth of poetry produced
by women during the war.
However, as Gill Plain has noted, the ‘rediscovery of women’s poetry of the
First World War has been greeted more with alarm than with enthusiasm’.^16 As I
have shown above, the valorization of the ‘authenticity’ of the (masculine) trench
experience and the demarcation of this experience as the particular domain of a
small group of front line soldiers is key to understanding how the canonization of
(^14) Sharon Ouditt,Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War
(London: Routledge, 1994), 217.
(^15) This is the only anthology of women’s First World War poetry, and it has been out of print
for many years. It was reissued, combinedwith Catherine Reilly’s later collectionChaos of the Night:
Women’s Poetry and Verse of the Second World War(1984), asThe Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry
and Verse(1997). The current renaissance of First World War studies is clearly indicated, however, by
thereissueoftheoriginal,Scars Upon My Heart, by Virago in 2006.
(^16) Gill Plain, ‘Great Expectations: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets’, in Vicki Bertram (ed.),
Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-Century Women Poets(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 25.