War diaries have long provided staple archive material for historians as well as contributing to wider, public perceptions of the past. For example, in Great Britain, many readers had their first historical introduction to women’s war experiences through Testament of Youth (1933), the celebrated memoir of writer Vera Brittain, ...
(Show more)War diaries have long provided staple archive material for historians as well as contributing to wider, public perceptions of the past. For example, in Great Britain, many readers had their first historical introduction to women’s war experiences through Testament of Youth (1933), the celebrated memoir of writer Vera Brittain, itself based upon her own contemporaneous diaries and subsequently made into a television series, and more recently, a film. Yet the centenary of the First World War brings the importance and role of women’s war diaries as historical evidence into even sharper focus. The past two years have witnessed a publishing boom in war-related works, including the publication and re-publication of lesser-known diaries. From a range of authors, literary figures and ‘amateur’ writers, from well-known celebrities and unknown women, these works bring a wide range of voices and perspectives to bear on the experience of living through a so-called ‘total war’. This paper intends to pose a series of question about women’s war diaries and problematize their use in the context of a centennial memorialization of war. Among other examples, the paper focuses on a recently-discovered diary of an upper-class housewife in Southern England and examines the journey it has undertaken from a treasured, if neglected family possession to an artefact in a national collection.
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