REVIEWS . 301 .................................................................................................................................................. C L A I R E M . T Y L E E &.................................................................................................................................................. `Not All Sisters under the Same (Bomber’s) Moon’?1 Gill Plain, Women’s All four of these works continue the feminist enterprise of reconstructing Fiction of the Second (British) literary and cultural history. Of course, having now reached the World War: Gender, Second World War, just as with the Great War, the tracing of women’s Power and literary traditions entails a revisioning of what is even meant by `war’ or `war Resistance, Edin- literature’. Unlike earlier work by Robert Hewison, Sebastian Knowles or burgh: Edinburgh 2 University Press, Adam Piette, these four books are not studies primarily concerned with 1996, £12.95 pbk. men, men’s alienation or the forbidden zone of male combat but rather with Jenny Hartley, the first total war’s extension of the war zone to include the home front. Nor Millions like Us: do the three that are analyses of fiction begin and end with the conventional British Women’s dates of 1939±45. They look back to the popular fiction of the 1930s and Fiction of the Second Woolf ’s polemic Three Guineas, and forward to Olivia Manning’s trilogies of World War, London: the 1960s. With many of the writers discussed having had careers that also Virago, 1997, embrace the First World War, it is tempting to collapse women’s responses to £9.95 pbk. both wars together. Lassner argues convincingly against such contemporary Margaretta Jolly, revisionism, which conflates turn-of-the-century feminist analysis of imperial Dear Laughing Motorbyke: Letters conquest, militarism and patriarchy with women’s nuanced debates over the from Women particularities of Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. Welders of the Second Although all four works have in common their intellectual and political World War, London: origins in the women’s studies movement, they remind me of the reproachful Scarlet Press, 1997, poem to white feminists penned by the black feminist Jackie Kay: `We are £9.99 pbk. not all sisters under the same moon.’3 Their theoretical bases and political Phyllis Lassner, commitments are at variance with one another. Jolly concentrates on a group British Women of fifty-two letters by working-class women (selected by Dorothy Sheridan Writers of World from the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University). Hartley surveys a War II: Battlegrounds huge range of fiction by over a hundred women, writing to ward off fear. She of Their Own, Basingstoke: Mac- is aware of the middle-class English, London-centred bias of her chosen millan, 1998, £45. authors (although she does try to identify Irish and working-class writers). Plain limits herself to five middle-class, self-consciously intellectual novelists. 1 Hartley 1997:224. 2 R. Hewison, Under Furthermore, whereas Hartley’s work continues the middlebrow thematic 4 Seige: Literary Life in approach of Nicola Beauman, Plain deftly employs Anglo/French femin- ............................................................................................................................................................................. Women: a cultural review Vol. 11. No. 3. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals 302 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW .................................................................................................................................................. isms in her analysis of how these five women tried to subvert `symbolic modes of patriarchal discourse’ (191). She is concerned with the construct- edness of gender, and of the particular double-binds set up for women by war-time propaganda. By contrast, herself an outsider vis-aÁ -vis Britain, Lassner goes straight to the heart of the matter: taking about twenty women writers and connecting their non-fictional publications with their fiction, she focuses not on class war, nationalism or gender politics, but on the racial politics of antisemitism and genocide. These were, after all, at the root of the public debate over the `just war’, and what problematized the questions of pacifism, compromise or resistance for women. Not unnaturally, her personal commitment gives a drive and energy to her analyses absent from the cooler appraisals of the British critics. It also produces a unifying coherence to her arguments at odds with the fashionable diversity adopted by Hartley and Plain. Hartley’s is the most accessible of the studies. It complements her earlier anthology of women’s non-fictional responses to the Second World War, Hearts Undefeated (1994), in which she did include the horrors of the Holocaust but had difficulty finding working-class voices, and it is helpful to set Jolly’s book alongside that anthology. Jolly studies a small, probably unique, set of letters that a number of working-class women who trained as welders in 1942 wrote to their upper-middle-class woman instructor. More intimate than the oral interviews in the Imperial War Museum archives, these letters not only respond to the women’s work experiences, but engage in the `self-fashioning’ that the war made possible for women before they fulfilled their `destiny’ of marriage and motherhood. Through detailed investigation, Jolly enables us to read this artless correspondence as inventive `popular art’, London 1939±45, London: Methuen, and to appreciate in particular the humorous accounts of sexual exploration 1977; S. D. G. as evidence of relations between the classes in wartime. Hartley too makes Knowles, A Purgatorial letter-writing one of the central genres in her study of women’s war-time Flame: Seven British Writers on the Second fiction: `At the heart of women’s wartime writing lies an invisible hoard: the World War, Bristol: millions of letters’ (123) because not only was much women’s war-time Bristol Press, 1990; A. Piette, Imagination journalism in the form of open letters but, she argues, women honed in their at War: British Fiction letters the essential skills of the novelist: storytelling, simulated spontaneous and Poetry 1939±45, London: Macmillan, conversation and the detailed descriptions of `dailiness’ so typical of the 1995. fiction Hartley examines. It is left to Lassner and Plain to show how women 3 Pratibha Parmar and writers also honed their ability to make plots figure political argument. Sona Osman (eds), A Dangerous Knowing: Hartley covers a huge quantity of fiction by women, including spy Four Black Woman novels, romances, historical fiction and family sagas, to showÐsometimes in Poets, London: Sheba, 1985. relation to such propaganda films as the one that gave her book its titleÐhow 4 Nicola Beauman, A women responded in their writing to the myths according to which Angus Very Great Profession: Calder has claimed that `the People’s War’ was constructed and maintained: The Woman’s Novel 1914±39, 2nd edn, `business as usual’, `village England’ and the common person as hero. Plain London: Virago, 1995. also uses studies of war-time films to identify state propaganda (although, REVIEWS . 303 .................................................................................................................................................. interestingly, many of the writers considered by all three critics worked for the Ministry of Information). Yet, whereas Hartley uses the terminology of genre in the service of her vast task of cataloguing and describing women’s war-fiction, for Plain genre is a more incisive tool. It enables her to argue for connections between the war and the literature that does not appear to have engaged with it directly, such as, for instance, Dorothy Sayers’s detective fiction, the historical novels of Naomi Mitchison, and Stevie Smith’s comic fantasies. These are three novelists that hold no interest for Hartley, although they also figure prominently in Lassner’s book. Unsurprisingly, the two novelists of major importance to all three studies are Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. (Lassner’s two influential studies of Bowen, published in 1990 and 1991, have already helped establish the significance of Bowen’s war- fiction.) Lassner also foregrounds Storm Jameson and Phyllis Bottome for their relentless witnessing to the fate of European Jews, authors glanced over by Hartley and Plain. Lest this should all sound too bleak, let me assure the anxious reader of the perverse imaginative delights to be found in women’s visionary dystopias of the 1930s. Margaret Atwood was not the first! The dominant myths of the period present Britain as a fortress defending village England (`the Nation as Pastoral’ as Simon Featherstone has termed it).5 One of our strongest visual images of the war is of St Paul’s cathedral, unscathed by the Blitz as London burned around it. Yet even London, standing in for the whole country, was thought of as a series of village communes: `Marylebone is my village,’ said Elizabeth Bowen. Films like Graham Greene’s Went the Day Well? and Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver sum up that idea of the village community overriding class differences in order to oppose the enemy. That propaganda still seems to mesmerize British academics, and it’s hard not to be impressed by women’s role in the extraordinary stand Britain made in 1941, or to stake a claim for their writing being a contribution to