The Great War and Scottish Nurses’ Diaries: A World of Distant Rumbling

This book analyses the representations of the different instances of war in the letters and diaries of the nurses and doctors of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals who worked in Romania during the Great War. These nurses detailed their experiences into journals through literary diegesis that included minute observations on their work, surroundings, and different developments of the front, as well as their own interpretations of, and impressions on, their work and the war’s destructive character. Generally, the approaches to the Great War by women who witnessed and lived it have either been gender-oriented or, simply, seen as petit histoire(s). This research represents a complementary addition to the existing literature, through its focus on the experience of the women on the fighting front, looking at it from the double perspective of autobiographical writing and war testimony.