Narrating the war from the window: Mildred Aldrich and the battle of the Marne
Keywords:
First World War literature, Mildred Aldrich, Battle of the MarneAbstract
The American author Mildred Aldrich was one of the first writers to publish an autobiographical account, A Hilltop on the Marne, about the First World War. This essay explores the letters that conform that text, written in the summer of 1914, and analyses the difficulties that Aldrich had to overcome in order to describe the first weeks of the conflict from a house strategically located a few miles away from the Battle of the Marne. Paying special attention to the rural space where the house is located and the urban space of the city of Paris, I explore the effects that the outbreak of the war caused on the French population and how the author dealt with her own war experience.
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Aldrich, M., 1915/1916. A Hilltop on the Marne: ‘Being Letters Written June 3 - September 8, 1914’. Londres: Constable and Company. 159 pp.
Bailey, S., 2010. Home on the Horizon. America's Search for Space from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan. Oxford: Peter Lang. 226 pp.
Brassard, G., 2008. War Is the Greatest of Paradoxes: May Sinclair and Edith Wharton at the Front. Minerva Journal of Women and War, vol. 2, nº 11, pp. 3-21.
Cather, W., 1922/1991. One of Ours. Nueva York: Vintage Classics. 371 pp.
Davis, R. H., 1914/1915. With the Allies. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 227 pp.
Einhaus, A. M. & K. I. Baxter, 2017. The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts. Edimburgo: Edinburg University Press. 480 pp.
Eksteins, M., 1989/2000. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Nueva York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 416 pp.
Farrar, M. J., 1998. News from the Front: War Correspondents on the Western Front 1914-18. London: Sutton Publishing. 238 pp.
Foxwell, E., 2015. In Their Own Words: American Women in World War I. Waverly: Oconee Spirit Press. 240 pp.
Fussell, P., 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 432 pp.
Gallagher, J., 1998. The World Wars through the Female Gaze. Carbondale: Southern Illinois. 191 pp.
Gilbert, S., 1983. Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War. Signs, vol. 8, n° 3, special issue “Women and Violence”, pp. 422-450.
Girouard, M., 1981. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven y Londres: Yale University Press. 320 pp.
Goldman, D., 1993. Women and World War I: The Written Response, Londres, MacMillan. 211 pp.
—, J. Hattaway & J. Gledhill, 1995. Women Writers and the Great War. Nueva York: Twayne Publishers. 388 pp.
Gómez Reus, T., 2011. Flânerie and the Ghosts of War: Hidden Perspectives of Edith Wharton's ‘The Look of Paris’. Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 22, nº 1, pp. 29-49.
— & P. Lauber, 2008. In a Literary No Man's Land: A Spatial Reading of Edith Wharton's Fighting France. En T. Gómez Reus & A. Usandizaga, Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space. Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp. 205-228.
Herrick, R., 1908/2007. Together. Nueva York: Hard Press Publishing.
Herwig, H., 2009. The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World. Nueva York: Random House. 432 pp.
Higonnet, M., 1999. Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I. Harmondsworth: Plume. 624 pp.
—, 2001. Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Hutchison, H., 2015. The War That Used Up Words. American Writers and the First World War. New Haven y Londres: Yale University Press. 304 pp.
Hyman Alonso, H., 1993. Peace as a Women's Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights. Siracusa: Syracuse University Press. 340 pp.
Hynes, S., 1990. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. Londres: Pimlico. 528 pp.
Klimasmith, E.M., 2005. At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930. New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press. 293 pp.
Lynch, K., 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The MIT press. 208 pp.
Mathews, J. J., 1957. Reporting the Wars. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 317 pp.
Méral, J., 1989. Paris in American Literature. Chapel Hill y Londres: The University of North Carolina Press. 296 pp.
Olin-Ammentorp, J., 2004. Edith Wharton's Writings from the Great War. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 320 pp.
Ouditt, S., 1994. Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War. Londres y Nueva York: Routledge. 246 pp.
Piep, K., 2009. Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I. New York y Amsterdam: Rodopi. 324 pp.
Prieto, S., 2015a. La paradoja del reportero de guerra: romanticismo y decadencia en With the Allies de Richard Harding Davis. En C. Manuel & I. Ramos, Letras desde la trinchera: Testimonios literarios de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Valencia: Publicacions Universitat de Valencia, pp. 359-374.
—, 2015b. ‘Without methods’: three female authors visiting the Western Front. First World War Studies, vol. 6, nº 2, pp. 171-185.
—, 2018. Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone: British and American Eyewitness Accounts from the Western Front. Londres: Palgrave Macmillan.
Quinn, P. J. & Trout, S., 2001. The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 245 pp.
Reilly, C., 1981. Scars Upon my Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War. London: Virago. 192 pp.
Sherry, V., 2005. Introduction. En: V. SHERRY, The Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-14.
Slattery-Christy, D., 2013. Mildred on the Marne: Mildred Aldrich, Front-line Witness 1914-1918. Londres: The History Press. 224 pp.
Smith, A.K., 2000. The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War. Manchester y Nueva York: Manchester University Press. 232 pp.
—, 2000. Women's Writing of the First World War: An Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 352 pp.
—, 2016. British Women of the Eastern Front: War, Writing and Experience in Serbia and Russia 1914-20. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 240 pp.
Stevenson, R., 2013. Literature and the Great War 1914-1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 280 pp.
Tandt, C. D., 2014. Masses, Forces and the Urban Sublime. En: K.r. McNamara, The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 126-137.
Tate, T., 1995. Women, Men and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories. Manchester y Nueva York: Manchester University Press. 320 pp.
Thoreau, H.D., 1854/2004. Walden. Londres: Imago Books. 190 pp.
Tylee, C. M., 1990. The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914-64. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. 293 pp.
Wharton, E., 1915/2010. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. Londres: Hesperus. 128 pp.
Wilkinson, G. R., 2001. Literary Images of Vicarious Warfare: British Newspapers and the Origin of the First World War 1899-1914. En: P.J. QUINN y S.TROUT. The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, New York: Palgrave. pp. 24-34.
Winter, J., 2000. Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War. Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, nº 1, pp. 7–11.
