In the 1920s the journalist Evadne Smith was asked by a publisher to write a female parody of Erich Maria Remarque's harrowing All Quiet on the Western Front called All Quaint on the Western Front, "by Erica Remarks".
Appalled, Smith decided to instead write a novel about women's real wartime experiences. The result, Not So Quiet, based on the diary of a real female ambulance driver, was published in 1930 under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith. It became a bestseller. But why weren't there more books like it?
The first World War devastated European women’s personal lives, but it also opened new opportunities as they flooded into the workplace to take up the jobs left by men. This was a huge factor in the passing of the 1918 Bill that gave British and Irish women the vote.
So it’s surprising that this subject has been relatively ignored by literature. With a handful of notable exceptions, comparatively few novelists, male or female, have focused on women’s experiences of the war and its aftermath.
But that does seem to be changing. In Toby's Room, from 2012, Pat Barker, author of the Regeneration trilogy, told the story of a young female artist working in a military hospital in 1917. Last year saw Elizabeth Day's Home Fires, examining the effect of the war on a young girl, and Jojo Moye's excellent weepie The Girl You Left Behind, set in wartime France. And 2014 sees a flood of intriguing new titles.
First up is Anna Hope's superb Wake (Doubleday, £12.99), a beautifully crafted novel about three women whose lives have been transformed by the war in very different ways. Adele Park's more glamorous Spare Brides (Headline Review, £13.99) shows how the war cast a long shadow over the women of the Bright Young Things.
Many more femalecentric Great War stories will appear in the summer. Juliet West's After the Fall (Mantle) is a love story set in London in 1916, while War Girls (Andersen Press) is a collection of new stories by well-known children's writers, including Anne Fine and Melvin Burgess. I'm particularly excited about Lia Mills's Fallen (Penguin), the story of a young Irish woman who is struggling with the death of her brother on the western front when the Easter Rising breaks out.
It may have taken almost a century, but women’s Great War stories are taking centre stage at last.
