Historical Fictionistas discussion

I'm looking for something very particular:

Personal accounts (e.g. as letters or diaries or as straight biographies) of young first-time nurses during WWI. This is for research and what I need to get a handle of is how they reacted a) to the task of taking care of a large number of highly incapacitated men and b) the typical injuries suffered by soldiers during the Great War. I'm looking for something in-depth and forthright, which I know will be hard to come by.

Just so it is mentioned, I did read Vera Brittain's Testament to Youth. I'm looking basically for non-fiction, but would take fiction if the relevant book was written by such a nurse herself.

Alternatively I'd also take such accounts of new nurses during the same time period (roughly 1900-1920) outside of the military.

Although fiction, this does tell the story of a nurse during WWI. The series is Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear and if not right for your needs is a really good series.

Thanks for the suggestion, but this seems to take place well after the Great War and when she is working already as a detective? She appears to be quite world-wise at the point this narrative takes up.

I'm sure it is a nice read going by the excerpt, but what I am looking for is--quite concretely--the reaction of a young girl who takes up nursing to dealing and handling males and heavy injuries under the conditions and societal education/expectation of a girl in 1914.

I'd also really prefer an autobiography or at least actual letters or a diary of someone who lived then. I've been digging through WWI books for weeks, and so far nothing stood out which fit the bill. It may well be that nothing ever will, it would take an audacious woman to write about that at the time.

http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoi...

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26884
Ellen N. La Motte was one of the first American nurses to serve in a French field hospital during World War I.The Backwash of War, a series of fourteen vignettes of a French field hospital, recounting her 1915 service in Belgium, was first published in fall 1916, before American entry into the world war. Once the United States had entered the war, La Motte’s unsparing view of the devastation of war was suppressed by the pervasive national propaganda effort of the home front, and the publishers withdrew the book. Republished in 1934, the book found a new audience among Americans determined to avoid involvement in foreign wars. Included here is her introduction to the 1934 republication, which gave the book’s publishing history, and one of the sketches.

The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War by Mary Borden
She also wrote a novel about a nurse set at the front, called Sarah Gay. There's also a biography about her Mary Borden: A Woman Of Two Wars by Jane Conway.

Thanks! These look very interesting and promising! Mary Borden's books I have already ordered a while ago and am waiting for delivery.

"We That Were Young" by Irene Rathbone.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20... A fictionalized autobiography about an aristocratic, suffragist-speaking British woman's experiences doing her bit in WWI (including working at a YMCA canteen behind the front lines, as a VAD (nurse) at a London Hospital, and as a munitions worker).

"Not So Quiet...: Stepdaughters of War" by Helen Zenna Smith (aka Evadne Price). http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13... Another fictionalized autobiography. Features a group of British women ambulance drivers on the French front lines during WW1.

I'm a long-time rabid reader of WWI novels and I highly recommend both of these novels. They are engaging, enlightening, entertaining, educating and emotional.

Best wishes with your research. Thanks for starting this thread...an interesting topic to be sure! (Here is a site that might be helpful if unknown to you http://www.warandgender.com/wgukwwi.htm)

There was a documentary done about Marion McCune Rice, it's available on Hulu.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/202424/grea...

blueemerald wrote: ""We That Were Young" by Irene Rathbone.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20... A fictionalized autobiography about an aristocratic, suffragist-speaking British woman's exp..."

Many thanks! I will most likely read all of them. Sometimes it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. I have a backlog of some 50 books on WWI right at my side already, which I will have to work through and it was relatively easy to come up with reference material on most of what I need, but women and how they managed to adapt to a sudden wealth of information and contact with men is hard to find.

I have no trouble imagining a lot of it going by non-war accounts and general mores of the era. But of course first or second-hand knowledge is much preferable! So thanks everyone who is helping me find this!

There are four books by Lyn MacDonald re WWI. She was able to interview living people who were there at that time. The books are They Called it Passchendaele, The Roses of No Man's Land, 1914, and Somme. RE women and sudden contact with men, they were awesome but I am speaking of mostly nurses, etc. I personally don't believe that women who were not nurses would have any trouble adapting to contact with men. I think they might have had trouble with the war wounds that the men came home with. I am a retired nurse and some of those wounds were pretty awful. Not much you could to do at that time in history.

Maude wrote: "There are four books by Lyn MacDonald re WWI. She was able to interview living people who were there at that time. The books are They Called it Passchendaele, The Roses of of Man's Land, 1914, an..."

Yes, that is why what I look for is difficult to find.

I'm not talking (only) nurses in general. There were thousands of often very secluded and guarded middle-class girls, some still teenagers, who started working as VAD nurses or nurses during the Great War.

While it is interesting to read accounts of seasoned nurses, the information I need is about those doing it the first time and that often very abruptly. The character I need to flesh out and accompany through at least one novel if not more is a very young, so far sheltered girl from an upper middle class family. She wouldn't have been very sophisticated in matters of the other gender at all.

Up to the war she would have met men only guarded by chaperones and certainly nowhere private enough to acquire enough knowledge to tide her over the worst.

So while all accounts will help, it's something very specific I'm trying to find. The big question is whether there was anyone with pluck enough to address this in writing.

The closest I came so far was with Brittain, but even she left things--in something written 1933--at a mere hint.

Hello again,
I don't know why this wasn't the first person on my mind to mention to you: EDITH CAVELL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Ca...

"Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a British nurse serving in Belgium who was executed on a charge of assisting Allied prisoners to escape during World War One."

There is a fair amount of literature out there about her. Not sure about a memoir, however.

blueemerald wrote: "Hello again,
I don't know why this wasn't the first person on my mind to mention to you: EDITH CAVELL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Ca...

"Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a British nurse ser..."

Heh! :-) I ordered two books about her last Friday, but thank you regardless. "My" nurse will be very much fired to apply for work directly in France due Cavell's death.

I don't know why I blanked on this (gads!), but there is a WWI focused group here on Goodreads ("Great War (1914-1918): The Society and Culture of the First World War"). They might well be a treasure-trove of ideas if you posted there.

Well, my input here is certainly in spurts, but I keep thinking of books I want to send your way. Here is another "Angels in Flanders: A Novel of World War I" by Jean-Pierre Isbouts http://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=... "Inspired by the true story of four young women who operated an illegal dressing station for wounded soldiers in the village of Pervyse, Belgium during World War 1" (per author/Amazon).

blueemerald wrote: "I don't know why I blanked on this (gads!), but there is a WWI focused group here on Goodreads ("Great War (1914-1918): The Society and Culture of the First World War"). They might well be a treas..."

Thank you! THAT is helpful! Why don't they come up during search? Because I swear I did search.

And please, if you remember something, I'll be happy to know about it. WWI has such a huge sprawling bibliography by now that any help with focussing on specific books is really appreciated by me.