The Women’s Land Army (1944): Vita Sackville-West’s Non-Fictional Wartime Writing

Abstract

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in Vita Sackville-West’s life, with the publication of a new biography by Matthew Dennison (Behind the Mask, 2014), about thirty years after Victoria Glendinning’s authoritative one, Vita (1983). Her love life and her skills as a gardener have been explored by critics such as Sarah Raven, Suzanne Raitt or Karyn Sproles. However, her fiction and her non-fiction remain underexplored by academic criticism even as her novels The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), her award-winning poem The Land (1926), her travel writing (Twelve Days in Persia, 1927) and her work on her garden, Sissinghurst, remain quite popular.This paper means to focus on a little-known work of non-fiction Vita Sackville-West published towards the end of the Second World War, The Women’s Land Army (1944). It came out two years after Grand Canyon (1942) – a work of speculative fiction staging the victory of the Nazis in the United States after they had won the Second Word War – and three years after Country Notes in Wartime (1941), a collection of essays that were first published in The New Statesman and Nation from August 1939 until 1941. The Women’s Land Army draws our attention to the lives of the women who joined the WLA during the Second World War. The status of this book is discussed here: is it mere propaganda, a historical document, or a piece of modernist writing? Raising such questions about the status of this non-fictional narrative helps to place the author within a modernist literary context.