‘Stepping into history’: reading the Second World War through Irish women's diaries

Abstract

This article examines two very different wartime diary accounts by Irish women, Romie Lambkin, a driver in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and Mary Morris, who nursed in England, France and Belgium. Both texts assert the legitimacy of the Irishwoman's wartime story through consciously placing themselves in history, affirmed by the difference between their ‘real’ existence as participants in the war, and the ‘unreal’ Eire, outside history and reality, a ‘fairyland’, as Lambkin calls it, of lights and food set against a blacked out and bombed out Europe. More broadly, drawing on theoretical perspectives on life-writing and identity, the discussion focuses on these accounts as dynamic, vividly written contributions to our understanding of the war experience, showing how the subjective experience narrated in a diary has an important place in the collective historical narrative of the Second World War.