WOMEN WRITING WAR:
Dr Eve Patten 2011--12 (YEAR LONG)
epatten@tcd.ie
This option explores some of the ways in which British women writers have
written about war in the twentieth century. We shall discuss the impact of the
First World War on the representation of gender and the theme of shell-shock, in
the work of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall and Vera
Brittain, and the contemporary response to the same theme in the fiction of Pat
Barker. In relation to the Second World War, we shall see how a range of women
writers, including Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Agatha Christie and Stevie Smith,
drew elaborately on concepts of fascism, treachery and espionage in their
writing, and discuss the depiction of women in war work and the armed services,
in writing by Monica Dickens, Sylvia Townsend and Sarah Waters. While this
course deals mainly with fiction we shall also explore the significance of poetry,
the wartime diary and autobiography, and the impact of popular culture,
broadcasting, documentary, propaganda and cinema.
Michaelmas term texts:
Sinclair, The Tree of Heaven (1917/18); Rebecca West,The Return of the Soldier
(1918); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); Radclyffe Hall, “Miss Ogilvy Finds
Herself” (1926); Pat Baker, Regeneration Trilogy (1991--95); Vera Brittain,
Chronicle of Youth (1922--1981); Virginia Woolf, “Three Guineas” (1938)
Hilary term texts:
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941); Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier (1938);
Jean Rhys, “I spy a stranger” (1941?); Agatha Christie, N or M? (1941); Elizabeth
Bowen, “In the Square” (1941); “The Happy Autumn Fields” (1944); The Heat of
the Day (1948); Sarah Waters, Night Watch (2006); Monica Dickens, The Fancy
(1943); Sylvia Townsend Warner, “Poor Mary” (1947)
Preliminary bibliography:
Hartley, Jenny Millions like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War
(1997)
Higonnet, Margaret (ed), Behind the Lines: Gender in two World Wars (1987)
Lassner, Phyllis British Women Writers of World War Two (1998)
Mackay, Marina Modernism and World War Two (2007)
Miller, Kristine, British Literature of the Blitz (2009)
Plain, Gill Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power…(1996)
Raitt, Suzanne and Trudi Tate, eds, Women’s Fiction and the Great War (1997)
Smith, Angela The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the Great War
(2006)
Stewart, Victoria Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (2006)
Tylee, Claire, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness (1990)