Wave Me Goodbye and Hearts Undefeated - Women's Writing of the Second World War : Stories of the Second World War

An invaluable omnibus that brings together women as diverse as Barbara Cartland, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, a Soho street-sweeper and an air-raid warden. Containing fiction and non- fiction from some of the most well-known writers of the twentieth century, as well as those who had never written before, this fascinating collection opens a window on to a hidden landscape of war.

ŒWish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye¹ went the jaunty wartime song, and that was what the brave-faced women did as they bid their men farewell. This collection of short stories, written by women when war was a way of life, includes some of the finest British writers of that generation: Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Rose Macaulay, Stevie Smith, and Elizabeth Taylor. War has traditionally been seen as a masculine occupation, but these stories show how women were, in a sense, equal participants. They reveal hardship, isolation, and deprivation. By turn comical, stoical, compassionate, angry, and subversive, these intensely individual voices bring a human dimension to the momentous events that reverberated around them, and each opens a window on to a hidden landscape of war.