ABSTRACT
Along with other writers of the period, emerging modernists May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf encountered great difficulty in dealing directly in their fiction with the battlefront trauma of World War I. A number of reasons can account for this, including their positions as noncombatant women in a patriarchally driven conflict.1 Nevertheless, both women were deeply engaged with and concerned by the war, in ways that overtly and covertly shaped their writing. Most obviously, May Sinclair participated briefly in a Red Cross volunteer medical unit sent to Belgium in September 1914, and thereafter serialized her experience in the English Review, elaborated on it in A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), and treated aspects of the war in five novels, including The Tree of Heaven (1917). For Woolf’s part, although she went so far as to claim in March 1917, “We do not like the war in fiction” (“Before” 87), literary critics have nonetheless found substantial material in her work for discussion of war.2
