Good afternoon, all. And welcome to this book at lunchtime event on commemorative modernism as women writers Death and the First World War.
Written by Dr. Alice Kelly. My name's Professor Wes Williams and I am the director here at Torch.
I'm delighted to welcome Dr Alice Kelly today to speak about her new book.
And also on the panel are Professor Michael Whitworth. Professor Jay Winter and Dr. Laura Rattray, who will be chairing the discussion this lunchtime.
It's a great pleasure to be here to introduce the second book at lunchtime of this academic year.
Book at lunch time is Torture's flagship event series,
taking the form of more or less weekly bite sized book discussions with a range of commentators.
Please do take a look at the website, a newsletter for the full programme.
I'll start proceedings today with a few words of introduction to the book and why we've chosen it for one of our book at lunchtime sessions.
Commemorative Modernism offers a new way of thinking about modernist writing by being the first sustained study of women's
literary representations of death and the culture of commemoration that underlies both British and American modernism.
Drawing on international archival research and previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home,
as well as the marginalised writings of well-known authors.
This book both demonstrates the intertwining, intertwining of literary modernism, war and material,
a memorial culture and extends our understanding of the canon of modernist writing more generally.
In a moment, I will hand over to Laura Rattray, who will introduce the book more fully, as well as the rest of the panel.
This will be followed by a brief reading by Alice from the book.
Afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts on the book, approaching it from their particular disciplines.
Will then give us the chance to respond to some of the points raised before entering into what promises to be a fascinating discussion.
The event will conclude with questions from you, the audience, so please do.
Add them to the chat box function as we go along and I'll moderate a question and answer session towards the end of our hour.
All that's left for me now, then, is to thank you all for coming and to introduce our chair.
Laura Rattray is reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow and director of the Glasgow Centre for American Studies.
Welcome, Laura. She's teaching and research interests in modern American literature and culture.
Women's writing and gender editing and publishing history. In 2016,
she founded the Transatlantic Literary Women Series funded by the British Association for American Studies and U.S. Embassy Small Grants Programme.
Publications include 21st Century Readings of Tender is the Night coedited with William Blazek,
the new Edith Wharton series credited with Jennifer Haydock and the unpublished writings of Edith Wharton.
While her new monograph, Edith Wharton and Genre Beyond Fiction, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Welcome, Laura, once again. And over to you now for the rest of the next part of the session, at least.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And it's a pleasure to be here today.
Sharing the discussion of Dr Alice Kelly's Hot Off the Press new book, Commemorative Modern Isms, Women Writers Death and the First World War,
a beautifully written, broad ranging study that puts women writers at the heart of its investigation.
And it's my privilege to introduce Dr Kelly and our speakers. Dr Kelly is a part time lecturer in American literature at the University of
Sussex and also the communications officer at the Welcome Mat American Institute,
the University of Oxford. And after her PHC at Cambridge and a Fox Fellowship at Yale University,
Genitally joins everyone at Torch in 2015 as a woman in the humanities writing Salib
before becoming a Harmsworth junior research fellow Obermaier American Institute.
Her research focuses on 20th century literature and cultural history in Britain and America, as well as commemorative modern isms.
Alice has published a critical edition of Edith Wharton's First World War called
Touch Fighting France and essays on Modernist and First World War literature.
She's held a remark fellowship at New York University.
She's also been a British Academy rising star for her interdisciplinary seminar series, which many of us know cultures and commemorations of war.
And in 2015, she set up the torch academic writing group, still going strong today in the virtual format.
Professor Michael Whitworth is professor of modern literature and culture at the University of Oxford.
He's published his thinking extensively on Virginia Woolf with his most recent work, An Addition of Virginia Wolves.
Night and Day for Cambridge University Press.
His previous publications include Einsteins, Wake, Relativity, Metaphore and Modernist Literature and chapters on Oliver Lodge's science writing.
And he's currently working on a project concerning science, poetry and specialisation.
In the early 20th century. And finally, Jay Winter is the Charles Jay, still professor of history emeritus at Yale University.
He's a specialist on World War One and its impact on the 20th century.
And previously, Jay taught at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick University of Cambridge and Columbia University.
In 20, 2001, he joined the faculty of Yale, and he's the author or co-author of twenty five books,
including Socialism and the Challenge of War Ideas and Politics in Britain.
Sights of Memories, Sights of mourning, great war in European Cultural History, and most recently,
well beyond words, languages of remembrance, from the Great War to the present.
And I'm not going to invite Alice, Dr. Alice Kelly.
Probably is going to get a reading from her book Commemorative Modernism set for Over You, please, Alice.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Laura.
Thank you very much. To talks torch oxfords for hosting this event.
And to my three brilliant panellists, not just for participating today, but for their encouragement,
their advice and their support of this project's over the many years that I've been working
on it and support that's range from reading chapters to mentoring to writing many,
many reference letters for fellowships and jobs. So thank you very much.
I'm going to begin at the beginning of the book and read from the first few pages and I'll show some of the images I include in the book while I read.
Introduction coaches surcharged with death. One of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead.
In March 1915, just eight months into the First World War, in a paper delivered in Vienna, Sigmund Freud presciently noted that,
quote, We cannot maintain a former attitude towards death and have not yet discovered a new one.
Freud expressed a common sentiment that the ongoing war had already fundamentally changed the ways that people thought about death.
The accompanying questions of how to bury, memorialise and grieve the dead began as soon as the war itself did.
In August 1914 and would continue long into the post-war period.
This book is about the ways that women writers wrote about death during and after the First World War.
It examines the impact to the vast,
unanticipated mortality on literary representations of death in British and American writing during and immediately after the war.
It considers the particular role that women writers played in enacting,
rehearsing and mediating the crisis and attitude towards deaths caused by the war.
While it was still ongoing and in that post-war period,
the major premise of the book is that the extent and nature of the death toll changed the way that death was represented in literature.
What Castro mentor referred to as a change of heart in regard to Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel Night and Day.
A second premise is that the unprecedented war losses and the subsequent coaches
of both private memorialisation and public commemoration are a crucial,
yet overlooked context for literary development in this period, including but not limited to modernism.
So this book argues then the intertwining of modernist war and memorial coacher suggesting that much of what we call
modernist experimentation in terms of death can be traced to its specific socio historical wartime and post-war context.
The writers I examined here wrote death within a range of genres, some predominantly realist,
some decidedly more modernist, and others working on a scale somewhere in between.
Rather than radically redefining these terms, my argument extends and refines the concepts as understood in recent scholarship.
The text I examine include works by writers of different ages, classes and nationalities,
accounts and memoirs by Persian American Knesset's, including in an Bagnold.
Ellen and Lamont and Mary Bordon works by Edith Wharton and American Rice, living in France from 1911.
Here she is in the war zones. The New Zealander Katherine Mansfield and the American H.D. Hilda Doolittle,
who both spent most of their adult lives in Europe, and the British author Virginia Woolf.
On the way, I also touch on text by Rudyard Kipling, Rose Macaulay, Ian Force10, Jean Reese, Christopher Isherwood and Elizabeth Cohen.
I focus my discussion on predominantly Anglo American women writers, the American writers.
I discuss how I lived in Europe. Writers from elsewhere, such as Mansfield or Reese, may draw up their home.
My geographical focus is therefore predominantly European and specifically British.
But in bringing these races together. I've kept in mind that particular national literary traditions, histories and commemorative cultures.
Modernist coach in the heart of the modern period, roughly 1910 to 1930, was inherently a war culture,
and the study of First World War literature is necessarily historicist and interdisciplinary.
My primary sources are literary texts, novels, memoir, short stories, letters, diaries, manuscript draughts and newspapers and magazine articles.
I read these fictional and nonfictional texts as well.
Writing produced in the context of total war, which constitutes a shared subject matter or subtext, whether explicitly or implicitly.
I simultaneously draw on the visual and material cultures of memorialisation
from photographs and paintings to break the news letters and memorial volumes.
This was as HD wrote to the poet Marianne Moore in 1917.
My culture surcharged with death. And now it just jumped to the very end of the text.
Many of these women writers live long lives after that after the war ended in 1918.
Many of the nurses I examined in the first chapter married in the post-war period and had families Warton stayed in France after the war,
producing one more explicit Warrnambool sun at the front in 1923 about parental and
civilian grief and dying in nineteen thirty seven in her home in the countryside.
Mansfield died young in 1923 as her talent was at its height.
HD lived until nineteen sixty one, writing and rewriting the story of a war losses in multiple forms.
Wolf continued to write about the war in the late 1920s and 30s before she took her own life in 1941.
We wonder how much that wartime experiences and losses continue to preoccupy these writers in those later decades.
The numerous men and the nurses remembers Mansfield's brother, Wharton's nephew, HD brother,
and her baby Woofs brother in law and the ghost of fellow writers and artists, Rupert Brooke on Regality Brusca Frederick Goodyear.
When the peace negotiations were concluded and when life seemed to move on.
When the 1920s moved into the 1930s, thirties and another war became more and more likely,
all these personal and broader losses must have stood out all the more.
So stop that and hand over to the panel. Thank you so much, Alice.
And what we're going to do and I'm going to comment briefly and then hand over to Professor Whitworth and then to Professor Jay Winter.
And congratulations on this, Will. I've been fortunate enough to hear some of the research in progress over the years.
I remember you standing in a field next to a trench giving a fantastic presentation as we prayed that it wasn't going to rain.
And I think many people in the audience will have seen your Times Literary Supplement article on that wonderful,
wonderful work you've done on Wootten story, Field of Honour, which had gone overlooked by generations of scholars.
And I think the impressive range of genres that you consider with this text and also the painstaking
archival research research in the Imperial War Museum that there is nothing narratives,
the Yale Centre for British Art, the visual and material culture.
We got some indication of that with his beautiful slides and the Byner key in the Wharton archives and others.
And I really wanted to bring in the structure of the book as well. I love the way you do that.
The first half of the book, Death in Proximity,
really examining those representations of death and writing by those who witnessed death close up firsthand, including the writing of masses.
And you also place Edith Wharton in that section. So you're beginning with text written when the war is still ongoing,
suggest that the proximity in which the war experiences the war dead influenced her mode of representation.
Then that second part of your book, Grief at a Distance,
exploring the responses of those largely removed from the war zones who didn't witness the death firsthand.
And these writers, as you suggest, are more likely to turn to abstract imaginative modes.
And one of the great take homes of the book for me was the way in which you suggest that literature
written under conditions of war and without the knowledge of when this war was going to ends,
provides some of the most generically and linguistically experimental examples of First World War writing.
And as a Rhodes Scholar is perhaps no surprise, it's the chapter.
I, particularly with a particular highlight for me was your intervention on Warton as a war writer.
And it's a very important intervention, reading Warton as a war writer and reading her alongside writers that we don't normally place her with,
arguing very persuasively that we should not be undervaluing that aspect of her body of work.
You point out that we've often focussed on Gorton's relief work and it's an extraordinary what she does there.
And founding hostel's and sanitariums, industrial scale funding, fundraising,
helping refugees, organising workshops for women who are out of work by the war,
making those five trips to the frontline in 1915 and writing about the moon magazines and newspapers calling for American intervention in the war.
It's an interesting case, I think that you highlight that Warton is a generation older than the many varieties that you look at in this text,
it's still very much involved. And the way in which she sees her peers to see the war in black and white terms,
the fight between good and evil civilisation and the descent into barbarity.
And you remind us that through all of this, she continues to write,
and this is very significant body of work produced during this period, work that is often dismissed as propaganda.
And we could certainly hold and sustain that tremolo note that this book invites us to look again.
That's her. How will work. And for those who haven't read the book yet.
When Alice focuses on a series of articles that would be published in Scribner's
magazine and the Saturday Evening Post and then collected as Fighting France,
published in 1915. A story coming home again 1915.
And those that unpublished, previously unknown story. In fact, the field of honour.
And I think what else what you do in that chapter. We really see Norton responding with all of her skills as a writer.
And you point to her seising this new subject matter that we.
She gives us an early impression of what she's writing about this.
Almost as soon as the war begins, a scripting articles in particular come very early.
And here in Alice Kelly's study, we see a Warton who's moving between literary zones,
who's playing with conventions, and it beautifully complicates lingering notions.
And they really are lingering notions of war as a jingoistic propagandist.
And this book demonstrates the literary ness, the complexity, the subtlety of her work during this period, which is generally overlooked example.
And there's a fascinating reconsideration of the atrocity story, the revenge narrative analysis, reading of coming home.
And Alice sees in this writing distinct moments of anxiety or apprehension, unease concerning the war dead.
And all of those readings that we get from Alice in that chapter undermine the
straightforwardly propagandist statements that were expressed directly elsewhere.
You see writing that betrays those anxieties about the justification for war, death, about the treatment of the dead.
And what we see is a really strong case when it comes to water as a rule writer.
We need to look again and say, I think it's a really important one of many important interventions that we get in that book.
So there's my brief comments. I said I'm now going to hand over to Professor Whitworth, if I may.
Over to you. Sure. Thank you very much for inviting me.
A good session. Thank you, Alex. Thank you so much for hosting some amazingly powerful work for sound bites,
powerful material handled in a way that acknowledges the suffering of soldiers and those surrounding them and the nurses and so forth.
But that does so in a way that also keeps discourse and linguistic playfulness inside the soul.
So in a way that seems ethically right in relation to the people involved.
And the threats of absolutely compelling running through it.
And there's also I think Lewis already alluded to this really fascinating range of materials with manuscripts,
letters and memoirs as well as more, if you like, conventionally formed fiction, both in realist and in more experimental modes.
And that those are things I found really exciting, exciting mix of work being brought together in RHD,
thinking about the way that film or popular song might be kind of spliced into the three works.
So that I mean, that raised for me interesting questions about another subject,
and that's where it gets in the Edinburgh and the whole companion of negation letters
to really powerful work elsewhere that overlaps with the mental traps upwards.
So I would also recommend that anybody watching this not write me.
A third question is about literature and literary love, which Laura has generally touched on in relation to two Wilson whether.
Yeah, whether conventional categories of the literary need to be expanded to take in things like memoir.
And because you're often looking at work sort of only through the work of feminist recovery in particular,
have been allowed into literary studies, don't necessarily perceived as canonical shown.
We're thinking about some memory, I suppose, in particular, unless there is a critical discourse surrounding letters.
But that's not really, I think, well established or canonical ways of dealing with them.
And so, yeah, like my question is perhaps unfocused or my might.
My observation is that how. How does Literarian sit in amongst these different genres and modes of writing, if you like.
And. Do the kinds of work, such as memoirs and letters that aren't so often treated have a distinctive power?
Or is not power an extension of the kind of writerly ability to frame in close and distant discourse?
We can also see a more conventional work, such as, say, man, two short stories or so.
So I think a whole set of interesting questions about the power of literature to interrogate official discourse.
That's one of the persons running through your book, isn't it, that some sense of a propagandistic accounts of war being subtly and sometimes not so
subtly questioned and probed and twisted and refracted by the the works we're looking at?
And it's also, I guess, questions about modernism and modernism in relation to the war.
You mentioned in your house and you talk about that being a war culture surrounding modernism.
And I a long time ago, Shari Benchtop, much 94 piece the letter from Paris in I guess the context,
a very male modernist Canada at that stage in the history of modernist studies.
It comes out quite strongly against sintering, the war and sort of tests that we're seeing so much of modernism, more critics of.
At times you can't show modernism as as a post war phenomenon and that displaced women voices.
And clearly there's been so many changes in the canon that those comments are, while important in that time, are not really stake any longer.
But nevertheless, I suppose I was kind of interested in how modernism and war fit together to you more generally,
whether because clearly modernism is going on before the war.
So we can't that kind of argument that one sometimes finds in undergraduate essays or kind of very simple accounts.
And just clearly that's not going to hold. I suppose a subtler question is, does the war change the course of modernism?
Does the war change the course of female authored modernism?
Does it change the opportunities for women writers in relation to modernist experimentation?
And this comment doesn't equate Madison Boost was the end about modernism being strangely haunted by the dead?
I suppose that raises question what it always was. It already haunted before 1914 or its a 1914 kind of.
Development and then kind of questions about modernist fiction haunted differently from so middlebrow or non-Muslim restriction,
is modernist fiction better equipped to deal with that?
Haunting me because it can make use of devices. Any literature can make use of the advances,
that it makes much more of illusion and makes much more of complex timeframes and timescales and so forth.
Does that mean that it's. In a sense, it has the affordance, is that the kind of equipment to deal with what happened in 1914 onwards?
So. And also interesting in the backdrop to this figure, in terms of the extended range of works you didn't think with here,
I suppose, is a question of do you want to admit memoirs or machos letters as modernist works for experimentation?
Or does it not matter that much with modernist or not? So, yeah, so it's a whole kind of stream of kind of questions that the book set off with.
And I hope that gets some testimony to just how exciting and fascinating I.
I find it. Thank you so much, Michael.
I'll hand over to Jay and then we're coming back to you. Alice. Yes.
Alice, thank you so much for asking me to join in this discussion of your important book and also for continuing.
I think now a several generations long successful drive to break down the foolish barrier between literary studies and historical studies.
Some of the greatest contributors to our understanding of the cultural history of the First World War,
Paul Fossil's, Samuel Hynes, are professors of literature. And the idea that history and literature are, shall we say, in dialogue,
constant dialogue is something that we owe to them and that you have carried on.
And I think a very remarkable way. So I congratulate you on that.
The second thing I want to congratulate you on, and it follows some of the remarks we've just heard from Michael,
you have, I think, the strength of recognising that the war didn't end in 1918.
That the distinction between war and post-war is something we we have constructed because it's simpler that way.
But the lived experience of violence carried on.
And I in particular, I want to congratulate you on the notion that the Great War was encapsulated in a greater war that extended at least till 1924.
And we can't read the wasteland without understanding that the post 1918 period is drenched in violence and mass death.
Now, one area I would like to draw you on, there is perhaps something we all are more sensitive to now than of year ago,
and that is mass death included the influenza epidemic.
And it is a backdrop to the distinction between pre 1914 and post 1914 masks,
the haunting of mass death requires millions of corpses and a particular of the young and that epidemic in contrast to the current one.
Targeted strong adult adults, males, maybe more than females.
But in that case, ethically, the evidence isn't conclusive.
But it was devastating for young males who were in army service during the war and after after it.
So I was wondering whether your story of mass death might be developed or what
have you thought about developing it in terms of the influenza epidemic? It's a question that I think is important in your overall theme.
Now, the second area I'd like to draw you out on.
I thought it was extremely important,
the way in which you showed that not only commemorative cultures framed the development of literary representations,
but literary representations framed the development of contemporary cultures, that there's a two way dialogue going on.
It isn't necessarily in one way, but in that to a dialogue.
I'd like to draw you out more on the Anglo American comparison or put it the other way around the British American comparison.
The United States did not suffer mass death in the First World War aside from the influenza epidemic.
The United States suffered a bloody nose in the First World War. Fifty thousand combat deaths.
That's about the same as the French army and two weeks of 1914. Fifty thousand men died of the flu.
To what extent are we actually justified in talking about Anglo American representations?
And so we say modernist, the modernist movement, or what I would call American Anglophiles like T.S. Eliot would become,
to all intents and purposes, entirely British rather than American.
One of the things that struck me my whole life is how ignorant Americans have been of the First World War.
And the reason for that is that it's not embedded in family history.
And the reason it's not embedded in family history is that the numbers, thank God for the Americans were relatively small.
The United States was in the war for only 18 months.
So I wonder about whether the concept of the national character of modernism is something you might you might think about in a more specific way.
And let me say that this is what Fassel, the two Fossil's book, the great book,
The Great War in Modern Memory, is really about London and the home counties. It's not about England and it's certainly not about Scotland or Wales.
To what extent can we say that the missing the silences in your book, which have always been there, are about Ireland, which after all,
knew about death in an entirely different way and knew about it longer, and that post-war period leading up to nineteen twenty three.
First the British. Shall we say troubles and then the civil war itself.
So what I wonder about, I think is important is the national assumptions that one takes into an analysis of modernist writing.
Is it possible to say that the American side of this is not related to American commemorative practises,
but to British commemorative practises or French commander practises?
But American ones to this day are threadbare compared to British and French ones.
They can't even collect enough money now to put up a First World War Memorial on the Mall in Washington.
They have been trying for three years.
I know that because I been trying to help and it can't be one single American corporation could do this if they wanted to.
But it's not part of the cultural history of the United States.
It may be in the future, but for the moment, not so much. My question to you simply is, is this an English story that has to be, as it were,
separated from an American one while admitting the importance of Americans to make,
as I did England my home for, despite my accent for so many years and my children and so on as evidence of it.
And the final final point I wanted to ask you about is.
Is France now? We know that the French side of the story was absolutely dreadful bloodbath.
Twice as many French soldiers died as those died in British forces.
And that's much, much more than that, an American forces. To what extent did French commemorative culture have a bearing?
Because what's really very interesting is how deep the village patterns of remembrance are in both Britain and France.
Probably more than anywhere else in the world.
Britain and France have a decentralised culture of commemoration where you go to the village square and you see the names,
the multiple names of the individual families. Is this something that is transnational,
that the writers that you looked at were certainly very sensitive to the question of mass death found in French culture,
something which, Brexit aside,
brought Britain and France together in an embrace that lasted throughout all of the 20th century and maybe even into this one.
So all I want to do is to tell you how much I enjoyed your book.
It is an important and I think exciting contribution to the literature.
And I look forward to many years of drawing you out further and seeing the development of your scholarship in the future.
Thank you, Alice. Thank you so much, Jay.
Well, I'm going to hand over to you, Alice, that if you'd like to respond to some of those comments, Liz.
Yes. Thank you so much for those comments. I'm so grateful for all those really detailed readings of the book that was so wide ranging.
I'm going to try and just respond individually very briefly to each of you.
Laura, I'm glad you like the structure, the book. It took me quite a long time to come up with that.
I think that is a difference in terms of whether you wrote about death,
whether these writers writes about death from a position of proximity in the war zones or from far away.
I align that with a kind of realist mode of writing about death using traditional modes.
If you close to the wars and using the modes of the Victorians really need audience graveyards and cemeteries, the death bed,
the Victorian deathbed scene and those who are further away from the war using necessarily imaginative modes,
turning to more abstract, more modernist modes, someone like H.T., as Michael mentioned,
turning to the cinema or using her own body to depict her stillbirth as a war.
So turning to much more abstract modes, I also yeah,
one at one point that came out when I was writing, this was how experimental the wartime writing is.
I'm glad you picked up on that.
I've I'm writing about a war while a war is still ongoing is a very, very different move from writing about it much later.
Previously we've thought about the Wolberg experience of sort of 1928 on as Mirabilis as being the source of moment of memoir.
But actually, I was very interested in the war.
Reisler it comes out while the war is still ongoing and actually just thinking about our current cultural moment.
I'm watching attempts to memorialise Crovitz and the Corona virus while this
very well we in the moment are trying to commemorate before something is ended.
It's obviously a very different context, but it's been very interesting to watch that same memorialising urge.
Without knowing exactly what we're memorialising about Warton, I think you've said everything we wanted to say, really.
I mean, Warsan to me is a fascinating Raices.
She was so versatile, so skilled at writing and frankly frustrated me to read criticism of her,
a wonderful field of Warton scholarship that dismissed that important joke,
that important moment in her, where she's really bringing all of her skills as a novelist to the cause of propaganda.
But as that chapter argues, there are also moments where we see Warton being uncertain.
She's a pro. She was a pro-war writer. But there were moments where she sort of trace herself and betrays her nerve as
well as rights that that uncertainty into a fiction and sometimes deliberate mode.
So I think that writing is really important, not one which I'm writing for Warton.
And it's important to recognise that she was writing about war from 1914 to 1919,
and then she suddenly turns and writes the books that she's most famous for, The Age of Innocence.
And that in itself is a really fascinating moment of deliberate amnesia.
You know, she calls it a momentary escape when she turns back to 1878 Paris.
That in itself, that famous novel of hers, is itself a mode of war, writing in a different guys.
I think to Miko's really interesting art, and it's so fascinated that you brought up the question of something being ethically right.
How do we read things in ethically right ways?
I'm glad you think I handled the tone right. There were numerous moments,
especially when I was writing about the nurses and looking through diaries in the
upper room exam where a nurse was on a hospital ship writing clearly under pressure,
writing, you know, both sides of this page and then up and down the page because of no space,
clearly exhausted whether you can apply the tropes of literary analysis to that kind of text.
And I really sort of went back and forth on that. And I think it is illuminating.
It is useful to think a nurse might be turning back to a Victorian deathbed scene.
She's read in a novel in order to make sense of the experience that she herself is in at that moment, trying to deal with the deaths of numerous men.
So I think it it I'm glad to hear that you also had that kind of ethical quandary.
I'm going to move on to, I think, the question of letters and literary ness.
I love all letters. I have to say, they've turned out to be something I'm very fond of in Mansfield's writing.
The entire chapter is about months with letters really to some things about the stories.
But I thought I'd write about how war stories and I ended up writing entirely about her letters and there were a few reasons for that one.
One of which is the kind of socio historical element of letters in wartime that this
was a story war because of the The Butler Education Act of the eighteen seventies.
Many, many more people were writing letters in the first ward or it was a.
The first kind of literary war and letters played a hugely important role in morale.
So, you know, there were twelve point five million letters going from Britain to the Western Front every week during the war and months.
It is a really interesting inversion of that because she wasn't the person at home, the woman writing to her man at war marry her partner later.
Husband was in London working for the war office.
She was in the south of France trying to find a cure for tuberculosis that would kill her five years after the war.
And what we see is her total reliance on letters as a means of survival.
She sees them as a kind of marker of survival, that having a letter back from Maori means she is still living.
So the letter is really interesting. She also, in terms of whether or not it's literary,
I make the case in that chapter that those marginal writers by mootness are
actually where we might see the most interesting modernist experimentation. So in her stories, we see some explicit stories about the war,
but it's actually in her letters that we see political Mansfield writing her
real actual responses to something like the Peace Day celebrations of 1919,
which she was horrified by. Or reactions to the death of her brother in 1915.
Or how rewriting the accounts of air rights in Paris to multiple recipients and changing the way she does this,
according to who she's writing to say those letters give her a kind of space for modernist experimentation and playfulness.
She embraced the war, at least initially, as a new subject matter,
and she played around with the metaphors and the language in the diction it gave her.
And so with those air rights, she might describe them as horrifying.
And unless it's a one person in another letter when I love to Cattell Jansky, she says the nights are full of moons and stars and big Zeppelins.
Isn't it romantic? You know, she moves into a completely different genre.
We can see how linguistic playfulness as it as that goes on, it becomes dark.
But in general, I would say absolutely.
I think the letters we should be considering them military terms are really important spaces of experimentation.
Does the war change the course of female authored modernism and how to modernism and will fit together?
I read a lot of criticism of modernism and I'll try not to speak for too long.
What modernist critics may say, yes, the war was important, but they don't really go into all the material,
social, historical elements of how actually that war dominated the culture,
saturated the culture at the time from paper rationing,
affecting modernist magazines to the language that people were using to the frames of reference.
They had to the fact that people weren't always having enough to eat, so they were hungry.
I mean, all of those things affected the ways they wrote. So I think we should be looking more deeply.
We should be trying to really historic size what the war meant for modernist literature.
I'm not making the claim that modernism wasn't already in swing by the time that the war began.
It was. It definitely was. And we see it modernist experimentation happening before the war.
What is so interesting to me, I think, is that moment of post-war, that conflation of two different moments.
We have the moment of post-war experimentation, nineteen nineteen to about nineteen twenty three,
which coincides with this moment of mass public commemoration.
We have erection of the temporary cenotaph in 1919, which becomes the permanent cenotaph, which is one hundred years old next month.
So that goes up in 1920, the burial of the Unknown Warrior, the star of the poppy appeal.
All of this context of mass public commemoration coincides with those modernist text, those canonical modernist texts we've heard about from Jay,
like the Wastelands, as well as really important text like monuments, the garden party.
These are all coming out at this moment of mass commemoration.
The question of whether modernist fiction is better equipped to deal with the war than say middlebrow.
Arguably, yes. And in the ways it enables abstraction, the way it brings up different perspectives, multiple ways.
And I think that's a longer conversation. I think that's a really fascinating question. I'm going to move on to Jay's points very quickly.
Jay, I'm really glad you think the history literature is working well.
I get that from you. I get that from Samuel Hinds. I got that from Paul Fossil.
I'm I think I'm very I'm very happy if that's working.
And I like your idea of the greater war. The fact that the war continues.
So even though they're all kind of superficial distinctions in my book between wartime and post-war,
I do say a number of times, you know, the war continued for many of these women.
And the final section of the book, the kind of afterword is called Modernism Ghosts.
And it's about how women continued to be haunted by these guys and to dream of these people for many, many years to come.
Not to me as the most moving section of the book cruelly and the question of the flu is a really interesting one,
particularly in our current contemporary moment. You know how much the flu affects us and stop the whole world.
Yes. I'm fascinated by why it doesn't hold a bigger part in the cultural history of death.
Why it doesn't hold a bigger take on our cultural imagination.
It's slightly anomalous this year that we may have heard of it because it's been in the newspapers as a analogue to our current condition.
But up until then, not many people talked about the flu or remember the flu and some of the reasons for that.
I talk about in the introduction, one of the most important things I think is timing.
The fact that it came right at the end of the war came in three waves starting in 1918, going into 1920, killed an enormous number of people.
But actually people conflated it with the death they have already heard of with the man at the front.
And there were sort of exhausted, I think there were war fatigues. And for them, those deaths just became another version of war death.
Also, the fact there isn't much of a cultural legacy of the flu until really 1939 with Catherine on Forces Pale Rider.
It didn't invoke this mass outpouring of literature in the way that the war did, but it really deserves much more study than it's ever received.
I think the question of British and American culture of commemoration, I think you're quite right.
And I think one potential frustration for me at the book is that there are very different commemorative cultures.
And it became apparent to me in writing it that I wasn't gonna be able to deal with the American homefront.
And the fact that it's it's a key difference that the British couldn't bring back their war dead from 1916.
The Americans could choose to return the war dead, to repatriate that war dead, which is a very,
very different causes and provokes a different way of mourning, a different mode of memorialisation.
I'm actually writing on the American culture of memorialisation right now because it's fascinating to me that in the American context,
in American memory, the first war is completely eclipsed by the Civil War and the Second World War in Vietnam.
But actually, if you were in American society, the war is everywhere.
You know, you can find a war memorial in Oregon that's in the shape of Stonehenge.
You can find road signs in L.A. that refer to first rubato, which you can find.
You know, the person who wrote over there in the centre of Times Square.
It's really fascinating that there are all these markers of the war, but it doesn't feed into the public imagination.
So it's a really astute comment. And I think American festival culture is something that, again, deserves further study, really.
And the Americans I talked about in the book are really Americans in Europe, as you mentioned, H.T. and Walson.
The final question about France. I think I'm going to hand it to you that you your.
You're the person who knows more about France, but they I'm struck by the comment about the villages.
I mean, the localised coach of commemoration that developed was very similar.
And I hope did result in some of those partnerships between British and French towns that we live on today.
The legacy of that. Thank you, everyone, for those comments.
Thank you so much. I'm going to invite the West back in here in the audience if you have any more questions.
We've got some coming in the chat room. Please do. To Austin and Chad.
We'll try to get through as many as possible through was done, T.J.
Did you want to pick up that point about France that was just raised? Well, yes.
All right. I will pick it up because it strikes me as a form of what I would call the democratisation of commemoration.
Both states are not important. What is important is civil society is the local lives and the local communities of people in mourning.
And that strikes me as extraordinarily different from highly militarised, centralised states at war.
The power of civil society to frame the culture of commemoration is something that unified Britain and France then and unifies it to this day.
Thank you so much. In fact, the question of the Frenchness or otherwise of commemoration is one of the questions
that's been coming up in one of the issues coming up in the questions and on me,
as well as the kind of Q&A track that you can see. I have another chat going on where people are just playing.
This is a great book. Congratulations on the new book. And also a great conversation.
Thank you for bringing modernism into into a whole new area.
All three of you. All four of you, in fact. So just time for a few questions here.
I think the first which sort of picks up on your last point, the J, if I may,
which is the difference between a kind of private commemoration and official political discourse.
So one of the questions that somebody asked is, is that something you address explicitly in the book?
Is somebody who hasn't read it yet, but he's looking forward to doing so. And if so, is it something that is inflicted by gender in particular?
Well, I think they're thinking about what they say. The thing about Jacob's room, for example, but one might choose a number of other examples.
Alice, is that something you want to address, the kind of question between the different from the public in the private and the gendered dimension,
not just public political and the private and the gender dimension of that question?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. That's something I talk about in Chapter five of the book about peaceful commemoration.
So that moment of mass public commemoration is very interesting in that we
have writers responding to what is happening on a political states led level.
So that's what I would argue, is that the memorialisation impulse is happening from 1914.
So we see this drought, this drive to commemorate from very, very early.
And that begins with the nurses in the first chapter trying to record and writing their individual men.
They've been witnessing, dying and trying to give them some kind of justice, giving them some kind of memory and writing.
And the way I talk about it is that they use the Victorian deathbed scene to try and give a kind of meaning to these mass deaths that are occurring.
And that, for me, is a key example of people trying to remember on an individual level.
The nurses also talk about things like trying to plant memorials for the men,
temporary memorials before anything official has been established and what happens in the British case.
The British government, as they realised they will have this enormous problem on their hands of how to bury the dead and how to commemorate the dead.
And it takes them a number of years to catch up with that. They're trying to do it as soon as the war begins.
But it takes them a number of years. And by 1919, they've been coming up with the ideas.
Now the war has finished. Of how they will do that.
And some of the ideas include the two minute silence and the cenotaphs, which becomes the temporary cenotaph in 19th.
Nineteen is so popular it becomes permanent and it's established on Armistice Day 1920.
The literature is really fascinating in this regard because it gives us an insight into individuals responses.
So the reading at the beginning of Chapter five is sorry,
Virginia Woolf's response to the opening of the permanent senator and how horrified she is by it,
and the kind of nationalistic discourses that are being pulled in.
And she's also reading every day about the burial of the Unknown Warrior and what the Unknown Warrior represents to the British people.
And the way I read Jacob's room is that is an absolute response to the Beryle the Unknown Warrior.
Jacob is the unknown warrior. And that gives the text a different valence.
I think. Thank you. I don't know, father, brother,
any of our because I want to comment on this this question of the private and the political or the gender dimension of it is one one two sentences.
It's the absence of 50 percent of the men who died in the First World War of known graves.
The artillery war is the basis of the haunting 50 percent of the men who died in British forces have no known graves.
And this creates an enormous field of anxiety.
In private commemoration, public language departs. And the point that I think Alice just made is absolutely right.
As there's a private world that is confronting an impossible question, because it's not just that the men are gone, their bodies are completely gone.
War has turned from being a killing field to a vanishing act.
And that's something families have no way of coping with.
Certainly states have no way of doing it, but it makes the private dimension much more important than the state dimension.
Could I just mention one very quick response to that, which is Rudyard Kipling is a really fascinating instance here.
I mean, yes, he's a male writer, but he's so interesting in this regard because he's very publicly involved with commemoration.
He comes up with the names, will live forever more. You know, he chooses that.
He's very publicly involved in selling the new cemeteries to the to the British public.
He writes something called The Graves of the Fallen. A pamphlet that's provided with the Times.
But then and that's 1919. In 1925, he writes The Gardener, which is a story all about a mother's loss for his son who is missing.
And so you have that kind of direct response of a public memoriser with a private response in writing.
He's a very interesting case in a way that's already answering.
I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name right, sir.
Bill Blazek has asked a question about whether this literature kind of writes about the impossibility of expressing the new nature of death.
And I'm very struck with Jay's idea that part of what we're what they're having to come to terms with is not having a body to commemorate.
And the literature, therefore, finds ways of of writing about ghosts, obviously, but also absent presences that linger.
Michael, I don't know if you want to come in on this question. I may be misreading your face.
Your your muted. No, at all.
It's hard to possibly about water that's there.
OK, so another if we shift slightly now there's another question, which are a series of questions which have to do with water.
And clearly, there's a number of watching scholars interested here. And one of them, in the sense you've already answered,
which is are might one read the other nonwar book some Morocco age organisms through the lens of the war experiences.
And it seems to me you've all effectively said, yes, these are all in some respect, war books as well.
The other a more sort of directed question, which is do you consider the novella The Mom?
And if so, what do you say about it? And that's about a broader question coming out of that is I just want me to I mean,
if one takes your general proposition that the war informs all of Wharton's writings and even those bits where it is not obviously present,
I mean, is that true of all of these writers who lived through this period?
Must one somehow read the war into their continuing lives?
Or is there a point at which one can sort of step away from it and say, I've dealt with that now I'm now writing about something else?
Yeah. Really good questions. The man is her 1918, Texas and Havana.
I didn't write about it in the chapter I would have done if I had time.
It's very interesting because some of the tactics that we see, particularly the tactics we see in war, reported.
So in Fighting France, she's talking about the substitution of buildings for bodies.
That's the argument I read predominantly in that tactic. She often depicts destroyed buildings in lieu of bodies.
And that makes sense. With Warton as an architectural historian would need written about the decoration of houses,
she is depicting corporeal destruction through the destruction of buildings. And what happens in the mom is she now?
To me, those metaphors actually become less. They become more explicit. She makes that more explicit as she continues.
I think it's also important to consider what that text is slightly more cliched in some ways.
And I think she was intensely fatigued. You know, she was writing it at the end of the war.
I do make the case that this writing is all of great literary value.
I think the man is possibly of less interest than something like fighting France.
But I'd love to talk further with other Wootten scholars about that because it's a text that deserves revisiting.
And West is interesting question about should we really be reading the war into all of this writing?
I mean, obviously we should have limits.
But I think it's interesting to think that when some when a writer wrote a death scene in 1925, it was very difficult, I think,
for them to remove themselves entirely from this context of absolute mass death happened five years,
seven years previously, and the fact that many of their compatriots were no longer there.
So I would say I've been thinking about this with Kovik. You know, will we ever see Mass the same way?
I'm not sure these things live long, long legacies, even if we're not aware of them.
Yeah. Yeah. My question about how long that will last is partly as a 16th century, 17th century scholar whereby,
you know, one can read Racine as being about the civil war, the 16th century civil war.
I mean, it's these things do laugh at least a generation. I would say when there's a kind of mass involvement of people in the war,
but that's that's to bring in a whole other version of France into the story for a minute.
This time, I think for two or three more questions, one of which is there's been talk of women's.
There's been little talk of women poetry here. That's a lot to ask you to write about poetry as well.
But I wondered if anybody on that on the panel thinks that.
Yeah. Is is women's war poetry part of this story?
Is or is it a less present feature than, you know, the stuff that that one might have been brought up in British schools at least of war?
Poetry is a very kind of male story. I don't know if anybody wants to address that question, I guess.
OK. Laura. Michael. Yes. I'll be brief, Michael. I think with Warton again, it certainly is a part of her story.
And she's actually a prolific poet throughout her career. And that's something we don't talk about too often.
What she finds, she turns to Pelchat moments of great emotional turbulence.
So we do see quite a lot of poetry coming out again from Wharton, from from the war.
Some of them pretty much propaganda pieces, as Alliss suggested.
Others really complicating that picture and giving us pause for thought and making us think again.
And partly as the war develops, those doubts, as anxieties become more persistent.
Voice that to you, Michael? Michael. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, just a different way of posing the question, which is the Pru's takes over some of those memorialising functions.
The poetry and the elegy had had to be famously will in Russians two to the lighthouse.
I need a new title, which I like that analogy. Do you think it was sort of advertising substantial so that I have an allergy to Virginia Woolf?
You know. Obviously, it's not interesting to ourselves because it was a question sort of that was bubbling up into the question.
But Literarian. Is that how you view it?
Yes, that the memoir moves into the price forum on his own.
I think it does, actually. I think people choose to memorialise in longer forms.
You know, initially it's sort of memorial volumes. So the kind of privately published things that are coming out.
And Wolf and Leonard are printing memorial volumes for Wolfe's for Leonard's brother
on that on that press in the same time that they're printing Mansfield's prelude.
So this is kind of interesting interaction of memorialisation with modernist modernism, new texts and modernism at the same time.
I didn't write about the poetry because I think it's a completely different John.
Right and skill. And I think the poetry, although we still need to do more on women's poetry.
I think that's for another scholar. But there are some very, very interesting examples.
I'm thinking of something like Charlotte Muse, the Cenotaph is doing it.
Sort of very similar gesture to what Wolfe is doing when she's writing about the Cenotaph in her letters.
So there's room for comparison. I think.
Perhaps one final question for now, at least, this conversation will clearly continue in lots of different ways.
But that goes back to the question of location that with sort of hovered over this whole discussion,
really, whether it's in terms of the national location that that Jay drew attention to.
And as a French scholar, I think piano has work and all the rest of it around and places of memory as well as your own.
But this sort of national account of what what the war was right down to the village.
So somebody is asked a question about how important the village is in commemoration,
both in terms of the villages in the US where they may be in war memorials,
which sort of paradoxically stand in relation to your proposition that actually it's not very much part of US culture or,
of course, war memorials in British villages. How important are villages in this writing?
And does that mean that we have to rethink to some degree, the geography of modernism as a kind of urban myth?
Maybe you're all doing that anyway. But I grew up with the idea that modernism with this kind of urban form of writing.
In fact, our village is vital to the modernist project. Yeah, that's a fascinating question.
And also just the idea of the local versus the national, I think it's really fascinating.
Why was I going to start with that? So many thoughts that brings up.
I mean, obviously, we have writers like Virginia Woolf still talking about those national moments of commemoration.
So seems set at the Cenotaph or seems set at national points of commemoration or
invoking national practises such as the aeroplane goes overhead in Mrs Dalloway,
the two minute silence invoking those national modes.
But what's really also key, as I think is coming up in the discussion, is local modes of memorialisation.
So I'm thinking of something like a text by Christopher Isherwood that should be better known at the memorial,
which is based around a local war memorial. That's like, you know, a key driving factor for the story.
I know there are many other instances of that in this writing thinking on a much smaller scale.
All right, Joe, you're nodding your head here.
Well, the reason why I do this, I think, is actually central to Alice's interpretation that local war memorials,
London doesn't have them a war memorial for London. Paris doesn't have one or just embedded one at Ploughshares.
Two years ago. But local war memorials are the places where women get into the public visual narrative of the war, though.
The mothers, the widows, the sisters, the friends, all those people there are.
Britain is as written about this quite extensively. These local places are not available in London.
Then they're not available in Paris. They are available to integrate women into the narrative of war in ways that don't require nurses there.
Everyone's story because it's the story of everybody's families. That's why I think The Villages is so critical.
And the village is a place where we can see families in mourning. Cities are not if they're not so easily visible because they're so big.
But your your interpretation also, I think is is exactly right on the idea that the Cultural Convention bring
women into the centrality of of the cultural history of the First World War.
Once again, I congratulate you on making that point, which has been missed all too readily in the past.
Thank you, Jane. You put it much better than I could. And the last the last site that's interesting, I think, is those silent cities.
So the pilgrimages that happened to the cemeteries and it's very, very moving writing from the 20s, Kipling's is one example of that.
Mansfield's the fly where a father, you know, depicts a pilgrimage to these new silent cities, the new cemeteries on the western front.
And that was a kind of localised sign of mourning when taking place.
Sites of memories. Mm hmm. We're gonna have to wind up soon.
But I I'm conscious that Laura and Michael, you've been very kind and stepping back and allowing others, including me, to ask questions.
Do you have anything you wanted to add to the discussion by way of conclusion?
If not, it's fine, but for the moment, Michael, your muted again.
Yeah, I mean, so many things I'd like to follow up, but I think we'll take those sort of a time or whatever.
Thank you. Laura. Huge. Congratulations on this.
I think it's a wonderful book and a much needed book. I'm really looking forward to seeing what's next.
Thank you, everyone. Well, I think I can echo the huge congratulations that are coming in.
You can't see the chat stuff that's going on alongside me as well as they the stuff that's in the Q&A.
It's clear that this book is going to produce a whole range of other exciting conversations like this one.
But it's also clear, I think, that in the Michael J.
And Laura, we've had some tremendous interlocutors here to make really exciting sense of what Alice has done.
So this has been an exemplary book at lunchtime from torture's perspective.
So we think of this as one of our own in some sense in torch because of the many different ways in which she's been connected.
And I think it's just great that we've had this rich discussion here today.
Many people are saying, huge congratulations to you all. So I would like to also thank you all,
thank all of our brilliant speakers today for a tremendous discussion and a
generous discussion that opens up all sorts of new areas and ways to explore.
A whole bunch of questions. You know, commemoration genda, the local lots of really interesting things to think about here before we disappear.
Then please join us everyone again, same time next week for our next book at lunchtime.
When we do move back actually to 16th century France. Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing the dire full spectacle by Jennifer Oliver.
Dude cheque the torch website to register for next week events and four others later in the series.
But for now, thanks once again to you all. And goodbye.