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Aldington, Richard (1892–1962)
Born in Portsmouth as Edward Godfree Aldington, he grew up in Dover. He studied at University College, London, but left without a degree to become a writer and journalist. In 1912 Aldington joined the Imagist movement, and edited the avant-garde literary periodical the Egoist. He was a close friend of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. He went to France as a soldier in mid-1916 and remained in the army until the end of the war. Soon afterwards he published a collection of poems, Images of War (1919), and his novel Death of a Hero (1929) deals with what he perceived as the soldiers’ archetypal experience of the war: profound disillusionment with and loss of faith in humanity.
Aumonier, Stacy (1887–1928)
The descendant of an old Huguenot family, Aumonier was an artist before he turned to writing in 1913. John Galsworthy regarded him as ‘one of the best short-story writers of all time’; and A. C. Ward claimed, in his Aspects of the Modern Short Story (1924), that Aumonier’s war stories resembled ‘an English epic of the Great War’ (252). Aumonier captured the varied reactions to war of his fellow countrymen, and portrayed the destruction of what many thought of as an English pre-war idyll in ‘The Match’ (1916).
Barnes, Julian (1946–)
Educated in London and at Oxford, Barnes has worked as a lexicographer, reviewer, editor and television critic. He is now a full-time writer and occasional translator, and lives in London. He has published crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. For his ‘serious’ novels, Barnes has won numerous awards, both in Britain and abroad, and his works have been shortlisted frequently for the Man Booker Prize. To date, he has published two volumes of short stories – Cross Channel (1996) and The Lemon Table (2004).
Borden, Mary (1886–1968)
Born in Chicago, the daughter of a businessman. While travelling in Europe at the outbreak of the war, Borden decided to set up a hospital unit on the Western Front. She stayed in France for the duration, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government. She met her second husband, Edward Spears, while serving in France, and went to live with him in England. Of Borden’s novels, Sarah Gay (1931)is also loosely based on her own war experiences. Her collection of sketches, poetry and short stories, The Forbidden Zone (1929), derives entirely from her war experiences.
Brighouse, Harold (1882–1958)
Brighouse grew up in Manchester as the son of a businessman, and, after an apprenticeship in a company selling shipping equipment, went to work in the cotton trade. In 1902 he moved to London, where he embarked on his writing career. Brighouse was a prolific playwright, who also wrote eight novels, a number of short stories and worked as literary critic of the Manchester Guardian. Many of his plays feature Lancastrians, and the factory setting of Once a Hero may also owe much to his roots in a manufacturing town.
Buchan, John (1875–1940)
Educated in Glasgow and at Oxford, Buchan was a barrister, journalist, publisher and politician. He wrote and published his first novels while still at university. During the war he was a correspondent for The Times, and, in 1917, was made director of information for the Secret Service. Buchan was created Baron Tweedsmuir, and in 1935 moved to Canada as its governor general. He wrote a large number of historical novels and many short stories, published in seven collections and in magazines such as the Spectator and Blackwood’s. However, his literary fame rests primarily on his spy thrillers, most famously The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915).
Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924)
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were Polish nationalists and belonged to the impoverished gentry, but Conrad was orphaned young and moved to Marseille at sixteen to seek his fortune at sea. After several years as an apprentice on sailing ships, he joined the British Merchant Navy in 1879. Once he had passed the required exams, he became a captain and a naturalized British subject. He embarked on a professional writing career in the 1890s, drawing on his travels and experiences abroad. Of his many novels and short stories, ‘The Tale’ is the only one to address the First World War.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859–1930)
The son of Irish immigrants, Doyle grew up in southern Scotland and studied medicine in Edinburgh. He soon began to write, producing historical novels, plays, poetry, treatises on military history and spiritualism, but he is best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories. An ardent patriot, he had already been an apologist of the Boer War, about which he wrote a propaganda pamphlet and a history. During the First World War, he agreed to work for the War Propaganda Bureau, alongside other popular writers like Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy. In the war he lost not only his son, Kingsley, but a brother, two brothers-in-law and two nephews.
Galsworthy, John (1867–1933)
After Harrow, Galsworthy studied law at Oxford, but decided to become a writer. As a novelist he remained one of the most widely read British authors until the 1950s. His fiction won him many awards, most notably the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, for The Forsyte Saga. During the war, Galsworthy donated all his literary income to the war effort and various relief funds; he also wrote for the War Propaganda Bureau. However, his attitude towards the war, and particularly towards the vilification of the enemy in the press, was not uncritical. His sister Lilian was married to the Bavarian painter Georg Sauter, who was interned during the war, to Galsworthy’s indignation.
Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895–1985)
Graves was born in London. He enlisted at the beginning of the war, although he had an Oxford scholarship, and his first poems appeared while he was serving in the army. At the battle of the Somme he was wounded so severely that his family was informed of his death, but he recovered, albeit with lasting damage to his lungs. After the war, Graves took up his place at Oxford, and later lived in Cairo, Mallorca and Pennsylvania. From 1961 to 1966, he was professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He perceived himself primarily as a poet, although he produced several successful novels, such as the best-selling I, Claudius (1934), a memoir and works of non-fiction.
Grossmith, Robert (1954–)
Born in Dagenham, Essex, Grossmith spent seven years in Sweden as a translator and teacher, then did a PhD at the University of Keele. His doctoral thesis, Other States of Being: Nabokov’s Two-world Metaphysic, was published in 1987, followed by a novel, The Empire of Lights (1990).
Hall, Radclyffe (1880–1943)
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born in Bournemouth. Her parents separated shortly after her birth, and after her mother remarried, she was brought up by governesses. Hall attended King’s College in London and lived in Germany until a legacy enabled her to move to London at the age of twenty-one. There, she lived first with her older (married) lover Mabel Batten, then with Batten’s young cousin, Una Troubridge. Early on Hall had realized her lesbianism and had many unhappy youthful love affairs. She and Troubridge remained together until Hall’s death, from cancer, in 1943. Hall remains best-known for her overtly lesbian – and initially banned – novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928).
Holtby, Winifred (1898–1935)
Born into a wealthy Yorkshire farming family, she went to school in Scarborough. There, she witnessed the shelling of the town by German destroyers in December 1914 and wrote about it for a local paper, and later in her novel, The Crowded Street (1924). She gained a place at Somerville College, Oxford, but took a year off in 1917– 18 to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. After the war, Holtby formed a lifelong friendship with Vera Brittain. Holtby’s best-known literary work is her novel South Riding (1936). An ardent socialist, feminist and human-rights campaigner, she also wrote for various newspapers and magazines, including the Manchester Guardian and Good Housekeeping.
Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936)
Kipling was born in Bombay, but educated in England. After his return to India, he wrote for newspapers, in which many of his early poems and stories were also published. After a wave of success wit
h his short stories about British colonial life he returned to England in 1889. In his collection of verses Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), he coined the archetype of the British soldier, Tommy Atkins. Kipling was a patriot, and some of his texts – notoriously his poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899) – have been read as inherently racist. However, he was also a critic of the Empire, and pointed out social problems at home. He first witnessed warfare in South Africa during the Boer War. During the First World War, he worked for the War Propaganda Bureau and was later appointed to advise the Imperial War Graves Commission. His son Jack was killed at the age of eighteen in 1915, and several of his First World War stories betray a loathing of the enemy. In his post-war story ‘The Gardener’ (1926), Kipling emphasizes remembrance and mourning rather than hatred.
Lawrence, D. H. (1885–1930)
Born into a Midlands mining family, Lawrence was educated in Nottingham and worked as a teacher before he became a full-time writer. In 1914 he married Frieda von Richthofen Weekley – a distant cousin of fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen. In 1917, suspected of being German spies, the Lawrences were forced to leave their home in Cornwall. They were denied passports while the war lasted, but left England in 1919. The novel Kangaroo (1923)reflects the Lawrences’ experiences during these years, but Lawrence also wrote a number of short stories about the war, which were published in England, My England (1922). The title story of this volume was first published in the English Review, October 1915, and presents the war as the means of self-destruction for a doomed and decadent English society.
Machen, Arthur Llewellyn Jones (1863–1947)
Machen was born to a clergyman father in Monmouthshire, Wales. Growing up in a lonely environment, immersed in Roman remains and Welsh folklore, he developed a lifelong fascination with the mythical and supernatural, and became famous for his ‘supernatural’ fiction and ghost stories, which had been popular in Britain since Victorian times. At various times Machen earned a living as an actor and journalist, most notably for the Evening News.
Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923)
Katherine Mansfield is one of the best-known authors of the modernist short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, she moved to London to attend Queen’s College, then took up writing. She had many affairs, and eventually contracted gonorrhoea, which was left untreated and may have led to her infection with tuberculosis, of which she died. Her second husband, John Middleton Murry, edited her letters and unpublished works after her death. During the First World War, her brother was killed at the front, but ‘The Fly’ and ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ are her only two stories that address the war directly.
Maugham, W. Somerset (1874–1965)
Born in Paris, he lived in France until the age of ten, when he was orphaned and moved to the home of a clergyman uncle in Kent. He attended King’s School, Canterbury, and subsequently went to Heidelberg University, then to London to study medicine. Maugham qualified as a doctor in 1897, the same year in which his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, was published. Maugham habitually drew on autobiographical experience for his writing. Too old to enlist for military service, he served as an ambulance driver at the Western Front for five months during the First World War. He also worked for British Intelligence in Switzerland and Russia.
Montague, C. E. (1867–1928)
Born to Irish Catholic parents, who had emigrated to England, Montague was educated in London and at Oxford. He was invited to work for the Manchester Guardian on trial after his graduation, and wrote in favour of Irish Home Rule, opposed the Boer War and, initially, the First World War. Once war had been declared, though, he hoped that full support of the British war effort would help to end the conflict quickly. Already over forty-one, he was allowed in the trenches for a brief spell in 1916, but went on to work for Military Intelligence, writing articles and censoring letters and news reports. Montague’s later writings about the First World War, above all his book of essays Disenchantment (1922), attempt to expose the inhumanity of warfare and show his disillusionment with the war.
Perry, Anne (1938–)
Born in London as Juliet Marion Hulme, she grew up mostly in New Zealand and now lives in Scotland. Perry was educated privately – her health was poor – and later worked in a variety of jobs before becoming a writer in 1972. As well as her two series of Victorian detective tales – one featuring Inspector Pitt, the other private-investigator Monk – Perry began in 2003 a new series set during the First World War. She has published several First World War novels, in which Cambridge professor and military chaplain Joseph Reavley solves mysterious criminal cases at the front and, aided by his agent brother and two sisters, fights the machinations of the mysterious ‘Peacemaker’ behind the lines.
‘Sapper’: McNeile, Herman Cyril (1888–1937)
Born to a Royal Navy captain, then educated at Cheltenham and Woolwich, McNeile joined the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1907. His pseudonym ‘Sapper’ is taken from the equivalent rank to ‘private’ with the Engineers. A prolific and popular short-story writer, McNeile turned out numerous stories about his war experiences, which were first published in the Daily Mail and collected in one volume in 1930. He remains best known for his Bulldog Drummond stories, written after the war, featuring a former British army captain turned private investigator. During the war, McNeile was awarded the Military Cross and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. While his later works have been characterized as racist and kitsch, his war stories are marked by his ‘professional’ viewpoint: although realistic, they do not condemn the war but stress the endurance and hardiness of British soldiers.
Spark, Muriel (1918–2006)
Muriel Sarah Camberg, of Jewish-Scottish descent, was educated in Edinburgh. At nineteen, she went to Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) to marry teacher Sidney Oswald Spark. The marriage soon ended in divorce. In 1944 Spark went back to Britain, where she worked for MI6 until the end of the Second World War. Besides writing poetry and fiction, she was also a journalist and editor, and published critical works on writers such as Mary Shelley and John Masefield. During the early 1960s Spark moved to New York to work for the New Yorker, and in 1967 settled in Italy, where she remained until her death. She published more than twenty novels – most famously The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) – and numerous short stories, which appeared in a Penguin edition, Collected Stories (1994). The recipient of a great number of honorary degrees and awards, Spark was created Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993.
Walpole, Sir Hugh (1884–1941)
Born in New Zealand to an Anglican priest, Walpole was educated in Canterbury and Cambridge. After his studies, he remained in Britain, eventually settling in the Lake District. A successful and popular novelist, critic and playwright, he worked for the Red Cross in Russia during the war. His war experiences inspired two of his best-known novels, The Dark Forest (1916), which ran into several editions even in the first year after its publication, and The Secret City (1919). In the Second World War, Walpole again engaged in volunteer war work, during which he was killed in 1941.
Wells, A. W. (1894–1977)
Wells, about whom little biographical information is obtainable, was the author of one collection of short stories, All This Is Ended (1936) and a travel book on South Africa, South Africa: A Planned Tour of the Country To-day, which was first published in 1939 and ran into several editions during the 1940s and 1950s. His only novel, The Secret of a City, was published in 1958.
Acknowledgements
‘The Bowmen’ from The Collected Arthur Machen by Arthur Machen, copyright © 1988 by The Estate of Arthur Machen. Published by Gerald Duckworth. Reprinted by permission of A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd.
‘Private Meyrick–Company Idiot’ from Men, Women and Guns by ‘Sapper’ Herman Cyril McNeile. Published by Hodder & Stoughton.
‘A Trade Report Only’ from Fiery Particles by C. E. Montague. Published by Chatto & Windus.
‘Victory’ from Roads to Glory by Richard Aldington, copy
right © 1930 by The Estate of Richard Aldington. Published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of Rosica Colin Ltd.
‘Heroes’ by Anne Perry from Murder and Obsession, ed. Otto Penzler, copyright © 1999 by Anne Perry. Published by Orion. Reprinted by permission of the author.
‘Blind’ from The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden, published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of Duff Hart-Davis.
‘An Indiscreet Journey’ from Something Childish and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield. Published by Constable. Reprinted by permission of Constable & Robinson Ltd.
‘The Tale’ from the Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 2, by Joseph Conrad. Published by Pickering.
‘Chanson Triste’ by Arthur Walter Wells from Best Short Stories of 1925, ed. Edward J. O’Brien. Published by Jonathan Cape.
‘His Last Bow’ by Arthur Conan Doyle from Strand Magazine.
‘Giulia Lazzari’ from Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham. Published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
‘The Loathly Opposite’ from The Runagates Club by John Buchan, copyright © 1928 by The Estate of John Buchan. Published by Thomas Nelson. Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd.
‘Mary Postgate’ from A Diversity of Creatures by Rudyard Kipling. Published by Macmillan.
‘Them Others’ by Stacy Aumonier from Great Short Stories of the War, ed. H. C. Minchin. Published by Eyre & Spottiswoode.
‘Told by the Schoolmaster’ from Forsytes, Pendyces and Others by John Galsworthy. Published by William Heinemann.
‘Tickets, Please’ from England, My England by D. H. Lawrence. Published by Thomas Seltzer.
‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’ from Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself by Radclyffe Hall. Published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of Jonathan Lovat Dickson/A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd.