Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War 1 - Softcover
Most books written about World War I generally focus on combat and the experiences of men. Lines of Fire challenges the restrictions of official history and traditional ideas of "war literature, " bringing together a rich and astonishing array of women's journalism, political treatises, diaries, and eyewitness accounts, as well as illustrations, fiction, and poetry written in response to WWI. Lines of Fire is also truly ground breaking in that it is an international anthology, including contributions not only from Great Britain and the United States, but also from France, Germany, Russia, Hungary, Belgium, India, Italy, Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East.
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Review:
In war, the voices of women often go unheard. When they are heard, they tend to be stereotypical, affectedly feminine: women as survivors, mourners, and sufferers. Literary scholar Margaret R. Higonnet decries this short-shrifting of women's contributions to war history, challenging the assumption that because women are excluded from combat (and even that assumption turns out to be false), their stories are necessarily secondary, inauthentic, or otherwise not "real."
About the Author:
World War I, in particular, proved significant for women because, as Higonnet points out, "many women ... contributed to the war effort in the expectation that they would gain the right to vote when the war was over." Their efforts were validated; with suffrage later passing in many combatant countries, the war changed the role of women for good. In Lines of Fire, Higonnet has gathered an overwhelming collection of works written by women in the midst of that conflict, works both political and poetic, from fiction to journalism to verse. Well over 100 distinct voices have been assembled, cited, and translated, representing an enormous spectrum of perspectives: a Hungarian countess recalls inspecting Russian POW camps for the Red Cross; an Italian field nurse recounts a grisly amputation; a French novelist describes prisoner prostitutes being mechanically called from their "dorm" by German soldiers ("Charlotte Z..., three chocolate bars ... Louise G..., one mark and a bar.").
The contributors to Lines of Fire include some of the century's best-known women writers--Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anna Akhmatova--and personalities such as Mata Hari and Jeanette Rankin (America's first female U.S. representative). As a scholarly anthology, Higonnet's work is weighty and worthy, but the quality that may recommend it most is its sheer accessibility. Its nearly 700 pages will pass quickly with a snippet read here and another there--short, memorable trips into the lives of remarkable women living in a remarkable time. --Paul Hughes
Margaret Higonnet received her doctorate from Yale University in 1971. She is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and an affiliate of Harvard's Center for European Studies. She is the author of prize-winning literary criticism on topics of the nineteenth century and children's literature, and the author of several books, including British Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century and Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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- PublisherPlume
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 0452011779
- ISBN 13 9780452011779
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages574
- Rating
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