Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, Resistance

This is a study of the writing of women novelists which examines the relationship between war and gender through the analysis of literary texts. Focusing on the fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers, Stevie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison and Elizabeth Bowen during the 1930s and 1940s, the book considers the different and sometimes contradictory ways in which British women writers responded to the threat of war, and to the actual conflict in this period. The author discusses the premise that if war represents a state of crisis for the patriarchal order, its influence on gender relations is pervasive. She argues for the specificity of women’s relationship to war, contrasting the cultural positions women were expected to assume with those they attempted to create for themselves through writing.