War Fiction and Women Authors

Interesting, thank you.

Georgette Heyer's description of the Battle of Waterloo* was (and maybe still is) used by the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Considering the number of accounts there are of the battle it says an awful lot that her account was chosen above all the others written by men.

*the description is in An Infamous Army

Nice link, thank you gothicangel! I'm exactly this type of author myself, so this makes for a very interesting read.

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I've found myself writing about war much more than I really ever thought I would. I don't particularly enjoy reading about war. It's taken me time to realize I do enjoy it, but not from the masculine heroic glory etc perspective (Bernard Cornwell versus Cecelia Holland). I like the point the article makes: the front line isn't the only story to tell about war.

Very good article, thank you.

One of my favorite books is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Set in the 1950's, it is a wonderful story about a family of Southern Baptists from Georgia (USA). The father is a head-strong minister who bulldogs his way into the Congo as a missionary, dragging his wife and four daughters along.

Each chapter is told by one of the females in the family, and the book spans 40 years. A brilliantly written story of a fictitious family dealing with actual events in the Congo in the 1950's and beyond.

Cool article. Thanks for sharing.

Very interesting. I find wars very interesting, but both in fiction and non-fiction I couldn't care less about battle scenes ("military history" as it's called in non-fiction). It's good to see more recognition being given to books about war that aren't just set on the front lines (though those can be great too).

mayqueen said:

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I've found myself writing about war much more than I really ever thought I would. I don't particularly enjoy reading about war. It's taken me time to realize I do enjoy it, but not from the masculine heroic glory etc perspective (Bernard Cornwell versus Cecelia Holland). I like the point the article makes: the front line isn't the only story to tell about war.

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Well, but a part of the point of the article is that even if the story IS about war and battle (such as in my case), when the author is a woman, the marketing may sell a work not as being about war, but as women's lit or family saga or the like. There's a sort of prejudice at play pandering to certain expectations.

If "War Fiction" is a sort of genre about front-line exploits of combat soldiers, then no there aren't so many women writers of that narrowly-defined genre.

But if you mean fiction that refers to war, life in wartime on the battle-front or home-front, or the consequences of war, then it's not exactly shocking that women have something to say here. War has become a far more all-consuming event, demanding ever greater human resources and expanding its destruction over a much wider scope. That impact rolls far beyond writers of shoot-'em-ups.

For example, who'd have thought Joy Luck Club was a war novel? Amy Tan has some pretty grim scenes of the Japanese invasion of China. I expect you could find many more similar examples without much effort.

BTW, my mother Jacqueline Hardy served in the USN, 1944-45.

Speaking of Vietnam. . .

No? Well, I will anyway. Just to recommend Laurie King's Keeping Watch. It surprised me how vivid the war scenes were. But mostly it's about how one vet was redeemed. (fair warning: child abuse triggers abound)

There's also the Korean war in Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips.

Currently my favorite story of women (and others) behind the lines is Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, a former Middle East war correspondent for the WSJ. The enemy in this story is not war but the plague in 1666.

This thread just now made me widen my interpretation of it and see better how the author's background fits with the material, like, perfectly.

One more comment and I'll quit being a thread hog: Has there ever been a war that didn't have some cry for protecting the home front? And has there ever been a home front that wasn't somehow trashed in the process anyway?