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

Abstract

This essay focuses on May Sinclair's A Journal of Impressions of Belgium (1915, London: MacMillan), Mary Roberts Rinehart's Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front (1915, New York: George Doran Company) and Edith Wharton's Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2010, London: Hesperus Press Limited), and examines how these writers reflected and negotiated in their writing their status as eyewitnesses to the First World War. In a male-dominated world, the presence of women writers at the front was unusual. These 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.