FROM THE PUBLISHER

Sayre P. Sheldon chose the twentieth century for this collection of women's war writing because women's roles in war have changed dramatically in this century. The twentieth century has redefined the meaning of combat and expanded the territory of war to include women in larger numbers than ever before. When the technological advances of modern war began to target civilians, the home front became the front line. Women took an active part in war whether or not by choice, often by moving into occupations previously closed to them. Women covered wars for their newspapers, wrote war propaganda for their governments, published their wartime diaries, described fighting alongside men, and used wartime experience for their fiction and poetry. Women writers also chose the right to imagine war, just as men for centuries had written about war without actually experiencing it.

Women writers anthologized here include Anna Akhmatova, Vera Brittain, Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Colette, Martha Gellhorn, H.D., Etty Hillesum, Kathe Kollwitz, Doris Lessing, Amy Lowell, Katherine Mansfield, Mary McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Parker, Mary Lee Settle, Gertrude Stein, Huong Tram, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Mitsuye Yamada.

FROM THE CRITICS

Lord - The Village Literary Supplement

Sheldon addresses the entire 20th century, and the way that technology has heightened the deadliness of war, particularly for civilians. Though frequently nowhere near the front, Sheldon's writers convey the anguish of combat through literary skill and imagination. Novelist Toni Morrison, born long after World War I, created a vivid depiction of that conflict in her novel Sula, which Sheldon excerpts. Other novelists have used visits to the front to put across their antiwar sentiments: Writing from Hanoi, for instance, Mary McCarthy campaigns against U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Times Literary Supplement

. . . An often quoted statistic is that 90 per cent of the victims of the First World War were soldiers, and only 10 per cent civilians, but that figure has now been reversed. Violence, as Sheldon points out in a long introduction, is everywhere. The victims of modern civil wars are almost all women and children, who then go on to make up some 80 per cent of the world's refugees. Women, she argues, bring a particular eye to war, clearest in their endless questioning of war itself. In support of this, she has chosen extracts from some seventy writers, from Edith Wharton in France in the First World War, to Martha Gellhorn in the Spanish Civil War and Iris Origo and Christabel Bielenberg in the Second World War. Much of what Sheldon has included makes the reader long to return to the originals. Most poignant, perhaps, are the extracts taken from the too-little-known Charlotte Delbo's account of Auschwitz and the portrait that it gives of women at the very end of their powers of endurance: wretched, starving, but still able to have fond and close relationships with the other women, and very mindful of the need for celebrations, however small.