Modernist Women’s Writing and the First World War

Alice Kelly’s Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War traces the profound effect that the dead of the First World War had on early-twentieth century literary culture. Using a literary historical framework, Kelly demonstrates that ‘the problem of what to do with the war dead’ (1) was crucial to the development of literary modernism, especially as it was formulated in the fiction of well-known women writers such as Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, HD, and Virginia Woolf. In addition to providing analyses of these imaginative works, Kelly also closely reads genres more proximate to the brutality of death, such as the first-hand accounts of contemporary nurses’ narratives and Mansfield’s personal letters–Kelly shows that ‘whereas the Great War only enters Mansfield’s fiction in largely oblique, and elliptical modes, it explicitly permeates her personal writing’ (122). The book also argues for the literary import of cultures of commemoration that took place after the war. The overall effect of the monograph is a diffusive, but cogent picture of early-twentieth century culture held together by a tragic centre. Kelly’s analysis moves from representations based in literal intimacy with the war dead to those narratives which only figuratively encounter the lifeless bodies of soldiers. Chapter 1 begins with writings by wartime nurses, whose narratives were sometimes widely read in the years after the war; Kelly shows the way in which, unlike the modernist writers whom she will consider for the remainder of the book, these authors wrote death in the style of older, more conservative forms of literature. Chapter 2 sees Wharton as a more moderate figure on the road to modernist ambivalence about commemoration and persuasively shows that the conventional view of Wharton’s war writings as unimaginative propaganda does not do justice to her distinctive anxiety about her actions in support Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernism: Women Writers, Death and the First World War, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, Hardback £80, ISBN: 9781474459907.