SOURCE: Potter, Jane. “‘A Great Purifier’: The Great War in Women's Romances and Memoirs, 1914-1918.” In Women's Fiction and the Great War, edited by Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, pp. 85-106. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Potter explores the transformative power of World War I on women's lives through an examination of women's romance stories and memoir writing.

Romance and memoir are by far the most common forms used by women writers during the First World War.¹ Most of the authors are unknown to us now. The works themselves are not ‘great literature’, but they are of literary and historical interest for what they say about the place of women in, and their attitudes towards, the Great War.

The texts I shall examine in this chapter all share a common theme: that of the transformative power of war. They also share the eugenic anxieties about physical...