Women's fiction and the Great War

The Great War stimulated a sudden growth in the novel industry. Well known writers such as Mrs Humphry Ward and Edith Wharton found themselves jostled by authors like Ruby M. Ayres, Kate Finzi, and Olive Dent. The trauma of the war continued to reverberate through much of the fiction published in the years that followed its inglorious end. Women's Fiction and the Great War challenges current thinking about women's responses to the First World War, questioning, even as it supports, the categorization of 'women's writing'. This volume considers some of the best known, and some of the least known, women writers on whose work the war left its shadow. The writing of some of the most famous modernist women writers - including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and HD - is reassessed as war literature, and the work of long-neglected authors such as Vernon Lee, Frances Bellerby, and Mary Butts is at last given serious attention.