Rose Allatini is remembered today for writing 'Despised and Rejected', the only novel to be prosecuted under the Defence of the Realm Act during the Great War as 'liable to prejudice recruiting in His Majesty's forces. The book's positive depiction of homosexuals and conscientious objectors alarmed the wartime authorities. But Rose Allatini was also the author (under several disguises) of nearly forty other novels, over seven decades. This monograph sets out to dispel the myth that these other books were no more than romantic pot-boilers. The novels' themes include: critiques of the position of women in London and Vienna at the start of the twentieth century; an exploration of the experience of mental illness; warnings of the rise of Nazism in thirties Austria, depictions of the experiences of refugees in London during the Second World War; and speculations about spiritual healing. Rose Allatini was a novelist who went where many others did not care to venture.

The First World War was a transformative experience for women, facilitating their entry into new spaces and alternative spheres of activity, both on the home front and on the edges of danger zones in Europe and beyond. The centenary of the conflict is an appropriate moment to reassess what we choose to remember about women’s roles and responsibilities in this period and how women recorded their experiences. It is timely to (re)consider the narratives of women’s involvement not only as nurses, VADs and mourning mothers, but as pacifist campaigners, poets, war correspondents and contributors to developing genres of war writing. This interdisciplinary volume examines women’s representations of wartime experience across a wide range of genres, including modernist fiction, ghost stories, utopia, poetry, life-writing and journalism. Contributors provide fresh perspectives on women’s written responses to the conflict, exploring women’s war work, constructions of femininity and the maternal in wartime, and the relationship between feminism, suffrage and pacifism. The volume reinforces the importance of the retrieval of women’s wartime experience, urging us to rethink what we choose to commemorate and widening the presence of women in the expanding canon of war writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

A fully-rounded anthology of women's writing from World War One containing the known and unknown biographers and fiction writers of the period.. Explores the impact of the war on ideology, gender, genre and society and is a perfect complimentary text to Trudi Tate's Women Men and the Great War.. Aims to re-read the First World War as a female experience by drawing on the public and private sources of a wide range of different women.. Uses diaries, letters, articles and essays many of which have not been published.. Invaluable source document for scholars in many disciplines.

This novel, written by Rose Allatini under the pseudonym A.T. Fitzroy, is a landmark in gay and lesbian literature, and in the literature of pacifism. It was unavailable to readers for more than half of the 20th century: the British government seized the unsold copies in 1918 and arrested and prosecuted author Allatini and publisher C.W. Daniel under the Defence of the Realm Act. This was a dangerous book on several counts. Although the author was prosecuted for the political content of the book as detrimental to war morale, the trial judge also took pains to denounce the book's advocacy of homosexual rights. Just two decades after the Oscar Wilde trial, gay men and lesbians were still not allowed to plead equality. In a Wellsian peroration near the end of the book, reminiscent of that author's "The Food of the Gods, " and certainly influenced too by Edward Carpenter's "Towards Democracy, " Allatini stakes a claim for a gay and lesbian consciousness as part of humankind's evolution, demanding not only tolerance, but acceptance. Allatini equates the gentleness and empathy of gay men and women with an inherent antipathy toward the destructive stupidity of war. The British penal system seems to have agreed with her in part, declaring pacifists and homosexual persons as criminal bodies, to be isolated and punished. It seems no coincidence that the sentences meted out to men who would not fight was the same as that accorded to convicted homosexuals: imprisonment, hard labor, and abuse by jailers. Every pacifist was an Oscar Wilde. Writing before women had the right to vote in Great Britain, Allatini offers a free-spirited lesbian heroine who suffers a painful self-acceptance. She depicts brave women who, because there are fewer other choices available to them, become helpers and companions to pacifists; on the other side, she skewers the conventional women who are complicit in the war fever that sent their sons to meaningless deaths in the trenches. Closer to Dickens than to Virginia Woolf in method, Allatini nonetheless has the ability to dissect the patriotism-crazed society around her. She works her plot to convey in strong terms that, for the middle-class English mother, the price of unthinking patriotism was the dreaded telegraph from the front, or the return of the amputated soldier. When Allatini enters the narration in the guise of Dennis Blackwood, she conveys his torment, and his much more tortured self-acceptance, in a convincing way. The all-too-British reticence, evasions, panic, and finally, self-awareness make us see that whoever "made her understand," was an extraordinary confidante. This book might have saved lives, had it been available in the pre-Stonewall decades. Despised and Rejected was reprinted in 1975 as part of the series Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature, under the editorship of Jonathan Ned Katz. After one more reprint in the 1980s, the book seems to have dropped from sight again.

This book investigates the connection between women's writing about WWI and the development of literary modernisms, focusing on issues of gender which remain topical today. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished diaries and letters, the book examines the way in which the new roles undertaken by women triggered a search for new forms of expression. Blending literary criticism and history, the book contributes to the scholarship of women and expands our definition of modernisms.

This study provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers (novelists, poets, dramatists, autobiographers) and topics. It provides contextualizing material, with concise introductions to related topics, including organizations, movements, genres and publications.

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.