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LASSNER, PHYLLIS. British Women Writers of World War ll: Battlegrounds of Their Own (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). 293 pp. $55.00.
SCHNEIDER, KAREN. Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997). 221 pp. $34.95.
Both Lassner and Schneider are American scholars who have joined a growing number of predominantly British academics whose research challenges the idea that British literature of the 1930s and 1940s was paralyzed by history, undermined by politics, and doomed to obscurity. Readers who have been eagerly following developments in this field may be tempted to compare Lassner's study to Jenny Hartley's survey, Millions Like Us: British Women's Fiction of the Second World War (London: Virago, 1997), and compare Schneider's study to Gill Plain's readings in Women's Fiction of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin's, 1996), but they will quickly discover that any similarities between these books are structural rather than substantive.
Since there is limited scholarship on British women writers as producers of war literature, readers who wish to gain an introduction to the variety and depth of this literature should turn first to Lassner's study. British Women Writers of World War II functions as a corrective to a critical past that, starting with reviewer Tom Harrison's comment in 1941 ("Never have I felt that I owed so little to so many" [p. 1]),, has mocked and ignored women's war writing in the process of dismissing World War II writing altogether. Lassner joins other feminist scholars in assuming that critics like Harrison (or, more recently, Salman Rushdie) have adopted values that "predetermine the neglect of women's war writing" because they define war literature "as representing combat experience" (p. 2). Lassner implies that if these critics had understood combat the way many women writers of the period did, as something that erased the division between home front and battlefield, they might have taken fiction by women more seriously and their assessments of war literature more generally might not have been so gloomy.
Perhaps Lassner's most valuable contribution to studies of the novel is her discovery and discussion of dozens of women writers whose books are out of print and no longer available in libraries. For many of us, her book will be...