May Sinclair, circa 1898. Portrait by Huggins. (Courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.)

Sinclair published a note clearing up the misunderstanding with the next extract of the Journal, and McDougall accepted her apology. But in her own copy of the published volume, now preserved in the Imperial War Museum in London, McDougall continued to fume, scribbling corrections and exclamations all over the margins of her book. According to her, Sinclair falsified many of the details of the story of the group's flight from Ghent. In the Journal, Sinclair writes that at Ecloo she and Ashley-Smith spent "a long time discussing which of us is going back to Ghent." But Ashley-Smith annotated the sentence crossly: "Rot There was no discussion I was on my way wh. I met them [the Munro Corps]" [sic]. In response to a footnote of Sinclair's claiming that Munro had his own plan for returning, Ashley-Smith wrote, "Biggest lie of the lot!" Faced with the statement that Sinclair "got on [the train] too, to go with her," she scrawled exasperatedly: "Tiens tiens! Dear me! I never saw this happen! . . . She said she wd. come if I waited till she got her 2 suitcases!!" She disagreed too with Sinclair's account of the Munro Corps's concern with her own safety after she had left. Sinclair maintained that they would all have returned to Ghent to fetch her back again had they not telephoned and learned both that Miss Ashley-Smith had arrived safely and that "no more women were to return to Ghent." Beside this last comment, Ashley-Smith wrote, "I don't think!", and she also noted that "the wires were cut" and "there were no calls going thru' & no one to know of my safe arrival!" She was even scornful of the Munro Corps's haste in leaving Ghent, scrawling on page 307, "They panicked the whole lot of them—there was no danger for a few days" and "they had no orders to leave Ghent when they did it was sheer funk" [sic]. It is impossible now to reconstruct precisely what happened. Both women were hypersensitive to accusations of cowardice and of shirking their responsibilities to the wounded men in their care. Sinclair may have fantasized about the pleasures of battle, but there was clearly something about her behavior that suggested she was, understandably enough, less than enthused at the prospect of participating in it in the flesh.

Sinclair's Journal was among the first wartime women's diaries to be published in Britain. Gladys Lloyd's An Englishwoman's Adventures in the German Lines had appeared soon after the war began in 1914, and the anonymous Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, Monica Dearmer's Letters from a Field Hospital, and Sarah MacNaughton's A Woman's Diary of the War all came out in 1915. The Journal was unusual in dwelling on what it felt like to be a spectator of, rather than an actor in, the scenes of violence unfolding in Belgium and France (among the diaries and autobiographical essays published in Britain in 1915, only Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne was told from the point of view of a woman who was not a nurse). Most reviewers of Sinclair's Journal welcomed Sinclair's concentration on psychology and characterization. Florence Finch Kelly, in the Bookman, noted that the Journal was "surely one of the most curious records of war experience of all the many that have been written. For, in the first place, it is instinct with temperament and, in the second, it applies to the portraying of experiences with a Field Ambulance Corps the method of the analytical, psychological novelist." The Spectator described her portraits of the other women as "triumphs of characterization," the Dial noted that "one knows the whole staff as thoroughly as one knows any of the characters of Miss Sinclair's novels," and the North American Review called it "the most genuine and vital piece of writing that has come from the war area." The Nation, however, found it shrill and personal. It fell to the young writer Rebecca West, with whom Sinclair became friends around this time, to identify what was really at stake in the text: "No triumph of good work that may come to Miss Sinclair will ever make up to her for the discovery that the artist is unfitted for the life of action. And yet every page of this gallant, humiliated book makes it plain that while it is glorious that England should have women who walk quietly under the rain of bullets it is glorious too that England should have women who grieve inconsolably because the face of danger has not been turned to them." Sinclair wrote, West remarked, as if she were "a little girl sitting on a tin trunk at a railway station and watching the people go by."

Sinclair returned on October 13 to an England that was already caught up in war fever. In March 1914, she had moved out of her little studio-flat in Kensington into a small house on Blenheim Road in Hampstead and, for the first time in her adult life, she had acquired a maid, Nellie Bartrop (Nellie's sister Florence took over when Nellie left Sinclair's employ in 1919). When Zeppelin raids on coastal towns began in early 1915 (London was first bombed on the night of May 31, 1915), Sinclair continued, out of loyalty, to spend most of her time in London with Bartrop and her beloved black cat, even though she had her little cottage in Yorkshire to retreat to and a standing invitation from Katharine Hinkson to join her in Ireland. On rare trips north for writing retreats, she felt uncomfortable, writing to Hinkson from Yorkshire in June 1915, "Though I adore these hills & these green fields, I can hardly bear to be here—to see the young men going about as if there wasn't any war, & the bean-feasts [parties] coming up from Darlington." She told Hinkson in 1917 that "pacifism is the one awful temptation we have to steel ourselves against. To me it's the worst conceivable treachery to the men who've fought & died since 1914, & to their wives & mothers & children. It's real pity & real tenderness to fight on & save the world." She was reluctant to be away from London partly because she had no intention of missing things, and she occupied her time getting the Journal into print (she gave all her royalties to the National Committee for Relief in Belgium), helping to make medical supplies, and writing novels in enthusiastic support of the war. She was committed to the war effort partly out of a sense of family responsibility. She told Hinkson, "You may wonder how I can endure to write. But I cd.n't endure not to write & to have no power to help the things I want to help, or to support my nephew if he comes home disabled from the War." In fact, not one but three of her nephews enlisted. Two died in 1915, aged, respectively, thirty-four and twenty-five (William, son of her eldest brother William who had settled in Hull, and Harold, son of her brother Joseph in Canada). The third, Harold Lumley, also one of William's children, spent most of the war in a prisoner of war camp, was invalided out in 1918 at the age of thirty, and collapsed with pneumonia, arriving at Sinclair's house in London and requiring devoted nursing for several months. As Sinclair anxiously followed news of the war, she was uncomfortably aware that young men for whom she felt responsible—and two of whom at least she loved (she may never have met Joseph's son)—were in danger when her own attempt at self-sacrifice had been spurned. Her safety depressed her. In the months that followed her return to London, under the influence of her new friendship with Charlotte Mew, she wrote three poems about being away from the danger of war. "Field Ambulance in Retreat: Via Dolorosa, Via Sacra," first published in December 1914, describes the retreat from Ghent and—à la Wilfred Owen—the beauty of the "red and white harvest" the "dripping ambulance" gathers from the fields. As the troops retreat: "Our shining, / beckoning danger goes with them, / And our joy in the harvests that we gathered in at nightfall in the fields; / And like an unloved hand laid on a beating heart / Our safety weighs us down." The unwanted caress of the "hand" of safety implicitly contrasts with the excitement and desire with which the implied speaker of the poem approaches danger. Sinclair's second war poem, "Dedication (to a Field Ambulance in Flanders)" (dated March 8, 1915) appeared as the epigraph to the book version of the Journal and speaks even more directly to her own experience. "Danger" is personified as an alluring presence who summoned the speaker into battle and "when I came within sight of her, / She turned aside, / And hid her face from me." The speaker thus cannot number her own among the "names" of those who went under "the thunder of the guns, the shrapnel's rain and the curved lighting of the shells":

I do not call you comrades,
You,
Who did what I only dreamed.
Though you have taken my dream,
And dressed yourselves in its beauty and its glory,
Your faces are turned aside as you pass by.
I am nothing to you,
For I have done no more than dream.

Sinclair clearly saw and applauded bellicosity as an essential component in healthy masculinity.

After Tasker Jevons, published in February 1916, she moved on to another project, less closely tied to her own experiences of the war, with which she felt much more comfortable. Telling Marie Belloc Lowndes that Janet Hogarth had thought Tasker Jevons her best novel to date, she commented, "Quite honestly, I don't. . . . But I like the book I'm writing now better than all of my books put together. And I hope—if it comes off—it'll be better than any of them." That book, The Tree of Heaven, drew on not only her experiences at the front but also her ambivalent relationship with the suffrage movement and on her strengthening involvement with the imagist movement in poetry. The Tree of Heaven was in many ways a synthetic project for Sinclair. The novel attempts to make sense of—and integrate—all the diverse aspects of her experience over the preceding couple of years. The novel is concerned with the Harrison family and especially with the experience of the three children—Michael, Nicky, and Dorothy—as they grow up in the 1900s and face the war as young adults. In 1910, Dorothy hosts a meeting of the fictitious "Women's Franchise Union" and in 1912, like the central character in H. G. Wells's novel Ann Veronica (1909), inadvertently participates in a suffragette raid on the House of Commons and is imprisoned in Holloway jail. When the war begins, Dorothy trains with the Red Cross and, after the death in the trenches of her fiancé Frank Drayton, joins an ambulance unit that is sent out to Belgium—like the Munro Corps—in September 1915. Michael is a poet and becomes involved with a group of avant-garde artists centered around the house of poet Lawrence Stephen. When war breaks out, he embraces pacifism and refuses to enlist, in spite of his family's pressure. Nicky, on the other hand, becomes an engineer and invents an early prototype of the tank. He enlists as soon as the war begins, and his death finally provokes Michael to become a soldier. At the end of the novel, Michael, too, is killed.

The Tree of Heaven was in many ways an unashamedly propagandistic novel. Sinclair's glorification of the spiritual uplift of war was typical of much of the popular fiction of the era (Cicely Hamilton in William-An Englishman [1919], for example, skates over the violent episodes of her story in order to concentrate on her protagonists' determination to win what she saw as a "just" war). Sinclair chose to ignore the spate of diaries, autobiographies, and novels from 1915 onward that emphasized the war's brutality and the powerlessness of both the men and the women who, after 1916, were compelled to take part (Mary Hamilton's Dead Yesterday [1916] explicitly criticizes one of its central characters for exulting in the war as if it were merely a pageant put on for his entertainment). Sinclair continued to see the war as a route to self-realization, and even in 1917 longed to return to it.

Although the title of the novel suggests that its central image will be the tree in the family garden under which the Harrisons regularly gather, in fact the book's governing symbol is the vortex, used as an image for the dangerous seductions of the suffrage movement, with which Sinclair was briefly and hesitantly involved between 1908 and 1912. At a suffrage meeting Dorothy speculates on her friend Rosalind's uncritical devotion to the cause:

Rosalind would always be caught and spun round by any movement that was strong enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex.

That was Dorothy's fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled the slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of the Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught and sucked down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go on whirling, under the impression that her movements made it move.

The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She liked the feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat up against the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and swerve away before the thing got her.

For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael had been afraid of the little vortex of school.

Dorothy's objection to the "feminist vortex" is that it draws women in and deprives them of the ability—or the right—to make their own judgments. The women at the suffragette banquet celebrating the release of Dorothy and the other prisoners are transformed by a kind of mass hysteria into primitive and irrational beings. When the prisoners enter the banquet hall, the crowd greets them with a strange, atavistic sound, "a savage and a piercing collective sound, . . . a clear tinkling as of glass or thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of small, slender-throated animals." To Dorothy "that collective sound was frightful." Its full horror is exemplified in the behavior of Dorothy's maiden aunt, overtaken by the "collective song" as the crowd bursts into the March of the Women. She screams: "Her head was thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane." The feminist enthusiasm of the crowd is embodied in the hysterical outburst of a frustrated and elderly woman, and Dorothy's later renunciation of suffragism as a waste of the time she could have spent with her male lover confirms the novel's skepticism about much of what the suffrage movement stood for. As Dorothy asks during a 1910 meeting of the Women's Franchise Union, "Are we not then to fight with our tongues and with our brains?" As Sinclair told Marie Belloc Lowndes in November 1917, she could not "join in anything collective. . . . I do really think artists sd. be held exempt from undertakings that they aren't suited for." In 1919, she wrote to Catherine Dawson Scott of "the hatred that I have of being identified with movements & with sets." The suffrage movement, with its huge processions and mass meetings, represented all that she despised in public life.

If the collective aspect of the suffrage movement was distasteful to Sinclair, the war was potentially even less attractive. But she was faced with the task of reconciling the fact of her resistance to mass activities with her desperate desire to participate in one of the largest mobilizations of populations that Europe had ever seen. The war presented her with a paradox: it was at once an example of the intolerable collectivity of public life and an object intimately marked by the separate investments and experiences of all those who had been through it. Sinclair uses the character of Michael in The Tree of Heaven to work through some of these contradictions. Michael initially refuses to enlist because of his horror of the "herd" of war and of its apparently unthinking obedience. At these moments in the novel the war too becomes an emblem of the degenerate "vortex": "the immense vortex of the War." Michael thinks of it as one of "the loathsome violences of the collective soul": "From his very first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that challenged the resistance of the private soul. . . . Michael . . . was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and from everything it cared for most."

Michael's mistrust here is similar to the unease of the young May Sinclair confronted with a religion that demanded her faith without her rational acquiescence. Both Michael and Sinclair are apprehensive about losing the discipline of privacy. They fear the pull of the crowd and the intimacy of identification with so many other souls. But Michael finally enlists, after his beloved brother Nicky is killed in action. The novel's descriptions of Nicky's and Michael's feelings at the front manage to negotiate the awkward contradiction of Michael's eventual pleasure in the experience of battle. In The Tree of Heaven , a solitary mysticism offers an escape from the vortex of mass warfare. Michael describes his feelings in a letter to Nicky's widow Veronica. "But suppose it is your nerves. Why should they tingle at just that particular moment, the moment that makes animals afraid? Why should you be so extraordinarily happy? Why should the moment of danger be always the 'exquisite' moment?" Sinclair was, of course, drawing on her own experiences in Belgium when she wrote these passages. But in The Tree of Heaven , descriptions like Michael's are used to challenge the idea of war as a manifestation of what psychoanalyst Wilfred Trotter called the "herd-instinct." Sinclair manages to make sense of her desire to participate in the war, in spite of her deep mistrust of mass movements, by describing it as a profoundly private experience of quasi-mystical ecstasy, in which the soul merges not with other people but with "Reality" itself. In reinventing war in this way, she also evacuates it of any political dimension: it becomes an internal object, a zone of heightened sensation and of self-discovery, to which wider contexts are simply irrelevant. As Rebecca West wrote in her review of the Journal, "One cannot imagine Miss Sinclair presuming to express an opinion upon international affairs." For Sinclair, "international affairs" were not what the war was about.

The Tree of Heaven pleased some reviewers with its enthusiastic endorsement of fighting as a spiritually satisfying experience. The New York Times Book Review, for example, noted that its "study of the psychological effect of the war on Michael is done with remarkable sureness and subtlety." Others found it "very partial" and felt that Sinclair's concentration on "the pervasive consciousness that makes a family" masked her ignorance of and callous lack of concern about war's brutality. Sinclair was especially grateful for a review by Frank Swinnerton, which went beyond consideration of the content to discuss the form of the novel. She was still aiming for "simplicity & concentration," but she felt that The Tree of Heaven was "not direct enough, concentrated enough." As well as her commitment to supporting the war in the fiction she published during the war years, Sinclair was tentatively experimenting with fictional technique. Her most radical attempt at innovative narrative was Mary Olivier: A Life, the novel that followed The Tree of Heaven , but Mary Olivier returned to a prewar setting. It was as if the formal innovation to which Sinclair aspired was incompatible with the message she wanted to convey of a just war in which all moral beings should participate. It was not possible to write heroic prose in the fragmented, skeptical style of the modernist novel.

Sinclair was working on Mary Olivier as the war dragged to a close in the autumn of 1918. But as soon as she had finished it, and the war was finally over, she started working on another novel, The Romantic, which returned to the sad tale of her own experiences at the front. Perhaps the cessation of hostilities freed her up to explore one last time what had really happened in Ghent in late September and early October 1914. Certainly she would not have been able to write The Romantic if she had still felt obliged to celebrate the courage of the Allied troops. In her workbook for the novel, Sinclair wrote, "The war has brought out his [John Conway's, the central character's] latent savagery & brutality. His frustrated sex avenges itself in cruelty to [blank]. To himself he blames her for his own break-down." The erotic exhilaration she experienced near the battlefields is counterbalanced by the possibility that men who lack sexual confidence will be unable to perform well under fire. If courage is somehow linked—as it was in her mind—to heightened sexual awareness, those who instinctively avoid physical arousal will have no way of confronting the imminence of death. In some ways, The Romantic reinforces the message of Sinclair's earlier novels The Helpmate (1907) and The Three Sisters (1914), that an openness to sexual pleasure is essential for mental and moral health. But in The Romantic, John's disgust at sexual desire is a betrayal not just of the woman who loves him, but also of the Allied cause.

The Romantic tells the story of Charlotte Redhead, a woman who, as the novel opens, has just been dropped by the married man with whom she was sexually involved. On a country walk she runs into John Conway, who, like her, is interested in learning to farm. Together they find jobs working on a farm in the Cotswolds and gradually realize they have fallen in love with one another. Charlotte confesses that she has been with another man, and John tells her he is relieved, since, as an experienced woman, she will not need sexual initiation from him. They agree to be a couple but not to become lovers. When the war breaks out, they form a small ambulance corps and, sponsored (like the Munro Corps) by the Belgian Legation, leave for Belgium. John is initially thrilled by the sensation of danger, but it gradually becomes clear to Charlotte that he would rather abandon her and wounded men than risk his own life. Several times he lies to her and leaves her in villages under fire because he is too much of a coward to come back for her. Eventually he is shot in the back and killed by the servant of a wounded Belgian captain he was too cowardly to help. McClane, the psychiatrist leader of the rival ambulance corps at the hotel where they are staying, explains John's psyche to Charlotte. He was a degenerate, he says. "He couldn't live a man's life." The novel ends with Charlotte joining McClane's corps instead.

Charlotte is, from the first, intensely attracted to John's body and face: "The young body, alert and energetic; slender gestures of hands. The small imperious head carried high. The spare, oval face with the straight-jutting, pointed chin. Honey-white face, thin dusk and bistre of eyelids and hollow temples and the roots of the hair. Its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an adventure." With John, Charlotte imagines she can experience first the earth (as a farmer) and then the war, as adventures that will bring her new feelings and new sensations. In Belgium, she is continually overtaken by feelings of pity and tenderness for the soldiers with whom she works. Supporting a wounded Belgian, she "could feel nothing but the helpless pressure of his body against hers, nothing but her pity that hurt her and was exquisite like love." The English countryside too moves her to feelings of affection: "And the hills—look at them, the clean, quiet backs, smoothed with light. You could stroke them." She assumes that she and John together will share these kinds of communion, opening themselves up to feelings and people beyond their usual limits.

But John's response to the countryside is excited and sadistic. He sees it as a challenge: "Fighting with things that would kill you if you didn't. Wounding the earth to sow in it and make it feed you." In true Freudian fashion, he cannot disentangle love and aggression, and he tells Charlotte that beauty and kindness have always grown out of some "damnable cruelty." John's reactions to Charlotte, as their relationship develops, bear all the traces of this ambivalence. In fantasy, danger attracts him. When they hear the guns in the distance, Charlotte feels that they are "locked close, closer than their bodies could have joined them, in the strange and poignant ecstasy of danger." But the reality of wounds, blood, and, most of all, fear, make John turn pale and run. As Charlotte puts it, "John's cowardice was not like other people's cowardice. Other cowards going into danger had the imagination of horror. He had nothing but the imagination of romantic delight. It was the reality that became too much for him. He was either too stupid, or too securely wrapped up in his dream to reckon with reality. It surprised him every time. And he had no imaginative fear of fear."

May Sinclair, circa 1924. Portrait by E. O. Hoppe. (Courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.)

Sinclair's interest in this psychic configuration—a configuration that was clearly not her own (she was haunted before she went out by visions of mutilated bodies) but that nonetheless spoke to her enough that she made John the focus of her novel—suggests that the war raised issues for her about the relationship of fantasy to reality, a "Reality" that she at first believed the war would deliver. Perhaps she used John to work through some of her own fear of sexual intimacy. For the first time, in insisting on being close to a man (Munro) to whom she seems to have been attracted, and on experiencing something (the war) that was never really meant for her, she was confronted with the intensity of her own desires. But like John's, Sinclair's war was not what she had expected. Whether she had, as she claims, repeatedly tried to go out with the ambulances, or whether, as Ashley—Smith suggests, she was reluctant, frightened, and disorganized, the romances she had expected did not materialize, either with Munro or with the idea of herself as a solitary, exultant hero.

Repeated humiliations reminded her of her own marginal status as an untrained, undesirable middle-aged woman. Her anxiety to be in Belgium was made to seem ridiculous and even ugly, like Viola's in Tasker Jevons. Like Jevons, John cannot stand to be made aware of Charlotte's—or any woman's—sexuality: "I loathe those women. There's Alice Bartrum—I saw her making eyes at Sutton over a spouting artery. As for Mrs. Rankin they ought to intern her. . . . Gwinnie hangs her beastly legs about all over the place. So do you." John is made to articulate some of the hostility toward women that Sinclair constantly associates with the battlefield, but he was also a character with whom she could identify. As a coward, whose face turns "sallow-white and drawn and glistening" bringing in the wounded from the battlefield, John is scorned and marginalized. Sinclair's interest in him as a character reveals her concern for those who are left out of the "herd," as Trotter called it: women and men who are disabled in some way—age, physique, psychic make-up.

Sinclair clearly saw and applauded bellicosity as an essential component in healthy masculinity (compare, for example, Rose Allatini's Despised and Rejected, published in 1918 and immediately prosecuted for sedition, which indicts the brutality of its heterosexual male characters). As McClane explains, John could never feel like a man. His degeneracy was a kind of feminization, an inability to "live a man's life." His repudiation of women and his excitement at the idea of war are both reaction-formations, attempts to compensate for the inadequacy of his masculinity. As McClane explains it, "His platonics were just a glorifying of his disability. All that romancing was a gorgeous transformation of his funk. . . . [ellipses in original] So that his very lying was a sort of truth. I mean it was part of the whole desperate effort after completion. He jumped at everything that helped him to get compensation, to get power." John's cowardice and his gender dysfunction are explained away as congenital conditions rather than as responses to the war. Although the war is at the center of the novel, it is oddly peripheral to John's psychology, as though Sinclair could not bear to give it the centrality it would seem to demand. Like John, she both invoked the erotic intensity of war and fled it; simultaneously complained that she could not reach it and wished that it would not reach her. It was both a loved and a hated object, one that constructed her as a problem or, at best, an irrelevance and yet one she could not let alone.

The Romantic was almost her final fictional statement about the war and the last text she wrote to be constructed around it. She took some care with it, consulting poet Richard Aldington (who had fought in the trenches) about the accuracy of some of the scenes. But it was as though, having written it, there was little more of interest to be said. Reviews were favorable, although, as Corrine Yvonne Taylor points out, some noted that the novel "comes perilously close to becoming a case study rather than an imagined work of art." Others welcomed its psychoanalytic bent: the review in the Spectator, for example, called it "a notable achievement in psychoanalysis", and Frederick Tabor Cooper declared that it had been "a long while since a purely degenerate type of man has been so consistently and relentlessly portrayed." But most reviews did not see it as a war novel at all. In later years, even Sinclair herself seems to have come to see the war as historically and culturally ephemeral. In a 1924 interview in the United States, she declared, "I don't think our literature was at all affected by the war, though I am not prepared to say this positively. Of course, when our men came back after years of fighting they did not want serious things. They danced and played, trying to forget the horrors they had lived through. Perhaps they read the lightest literature at that time. But it was only a temporary state of mind." Characteristically, she divorces "the war" from the processes of historical transformation and presents it merely as a slight interruption to literary history. Once Sinclair had made a definitive statement about the psychic geographies war configured, she simply put it behind her. The war had not, in the end, delivered the personal and cultural transformations she had at first hoped for. After all, why should life be more "real" in war-torn Belgium than anywhere else? If it was passing her by, it passed her by just as much on the front as it did back in civilian society.

Further Reading Boll, Theophilus E. M., Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: a Biographical and Critical Introduction (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1973). Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Women and War (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990). Mitchell, David, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). Sinclair, May, The Tree of Heaven (New York: Macmillan, 1917). __, The Romantic (New York: Macmillan, 1920). __, Mary Olivier: A Life (New York: Macmillan, 1919). __, Life and Death of Harriett Frean (New York: Macmillan, 1922). __, "The Intercessor," in The Intercessor and Other Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1932). Tylee, Claire M., The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914-64 (London: Macmillan, 1990).

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