Introduction

Abstract

The ideas that generated this book have had a long gestation. My early interest was aroused by the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a teenager, the novels of Haggard, Conan Doyle, Stoker, Stevenson, Wells, Kipling and later Wilde, Conrad, Bennett and Forster filled my shelves. But where were the popular women novelists of this time? Female novelists such as Elinor Glyn, Bertha Ruck and many others are not part of the canon in the way that male novelists are. My interests then extended into the culture of the period and my quest for women’s writing expanded to include their autobiographies. This too seemed sparsely represented in the print canon when compared with autobiographies written by men. Of course there was Brittain, often discussed as the representative female from the Edwardian period and the First World War period. But where were other women’s lives? The history books acknowledged the pioneering women doctors, the thousands of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), countless Suffragettes, an occasional actress, and so on. It seemed clear to me, that although men were the journalists and academic ‘gatekeepers’ of this thread of cultural history, there must be many female autobiographies waiting to be uncovered.¹ I wanted to ‘hear’ the women themselves.