‘Differences that Divide and Bind’

Abstract

The title of this chapter is the title of a 1942 essay in Time and Tide by Rebecca West.² Like so many British women writers, her inspiration to find meaning in a second world war began with the losses of World War I. Their painful memories were often similar, and not just because so many lost loved ones. It was also because they remembered how their struggles for equality lost ground to the lure of supporting the nation last time it was threatened by world war. Many had rallied to that earlier war effort on behalf of brothers and lovers who risked their lives for it. When the war invaded the home front with a dreaded telegram, many women, including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, and Virginia Woolf, turned their anguish into rage against all wars and became pacifists. But just as World War I garnered impassioned differences among women, the awful possibility of an even more engulfing war moved them to weave memory into different patterns for world peace. So Vera Brittain crafted her 1933 odyssey of feminism and pacifism, Testament of Youth, out of her diaries of World War I’s inexplicable waste. Storm Jameson wove her despair at her young brother’s senseless death into many later narratives, each of them arguing the justice of a new and different world war.

In these days when there is a bad name for detachment, it is hard to assess the detached man.¹

Elizabeth Bowen, 1941