British Women Writing War

Katherine Cooper reveals how contemporary assessments of gender, war and writing are shaped by preconceptions concerning experience and authority. Storm Jameson’s key war novels are at odds with conventional appraisals of war writing, which has contributed to her undeserved critical neglect. Her challenge to such prescribed gender boundaries has led to a perception of her work as ‘unwieldy’ and unrepresentative. Second and third-wave feminist studies, untrammelled by overriding concerns with gender, authority and experience, have reassessed women writers of the period. Nevertheless, Jameson’s critique of the systems of war through the male viewpoint lends her narratives a certain authority leading to their marginalization in those critical endeavours dedicated to the privileging and recovery of ‘female’ experience through women’s writing. Jameson’s exposé of the limits of insular nationalism has also hampered her full and proper reassessment within the canon of war writing.