Dispatches from the home front: Violet Hunt as war writer and reluctant modernist

Abstract

ABSTRACT The life and work of Violet Hunt showcases the tension between modernism's challenges to Victorian and Edwardian literary and social traditions, and the conservatism, particularly with regard to gender norms, of many of the modernist canon's key figures: institutions, writers and critics alike. Although her work was well-regarded during her lifetime, and she was a central figure in London's literary scene in the early-twentieth century, Hunt is now best known for her long, and ultimately disastrous, relationship with Ford Madox Ford. Her copious literary oeuvre, comprising seventeen novels, three collections of short stories, and several works of biography, translation and criticism, is now largely neglected. Hunt's exclusion from the modernist canon mirrors that of many other women writers of the period; however, Hunt's “recovery” remains a difficult case. Her numerous affairs, suffragettism, blending of Victorian, Edwardian and modernist styles, and authorial focus on the lives of women, all challenge conventional cultural and literary categories. Yet Hunt's work, especially during and after World War I, is important, as it offers an alternative not only to the male-centric war canon, but also to more traditional understandings of modernism, which is often presented as a break from the past.