Phyllis Lassner (Essay Date Summer 1990)

SOURCE: Lassner, Phyllis. "The Quiet Revolution: World War II and the English Domestic Novel." Mosaic 23, no. 3 (summer 1990): 86-100.

In the following essay, Lassner studies the impact of World War II on female British authors, contending that these writers used the conventions of the domestic novel as a filter for their experiences during the war through which they questioned both the domestic and political ideology of war and society.

In her 1982 poem entitled "Picture From the Blitz," Lois Clark commemorated the British women who suffered the loss of their homes while holding down the home front during World War II:

After all these years
I can still close my eyes and see
her sitting there,
in her big armchair,
grotesque under an open sky,
framed by the jagged lines of her broken house.

The English domestic...