‘Without methods’: three female authors visiting the Western Front

What is it about?

This essay focuses on May Sinclair's A Journal of Impressions of Belgium, Mary Roberts Rinehart's Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front and Edith Wharton's Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2010, London: Hesperus Press Limited), and examines how these writers dealt with their experience as eyewitnesses to the First World War.

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Why is it important?

This essay offers an alternative view of First World War literature and compares the experiences of these three women as opposed to the experience underwent by combatants and other eyewitnesses to the conflict. In a male-dominated world, the presence of women writers at the front was unusual. The three authors wrote about their condition as ‘other’ in a world that had been traditionally secluded for them, and had to negotiate the strategies they would resort in order to portray the conflict.