ABSTRACT
There has always been a strong connection between fiction and memory, perhaps particularly so for First World War fiction, triggered even in the 1920s and 1930s by a combination of commemoration and commerciality. Cultural memory is informed by collective memory. Multiple group memories intermingle in the creation of collective memory, textual narratives inevitably impacting on this corroboration. Cultural memory is determined by the ways in which collective memory is translated through a society or culture. Christine Hallett has argued that nurses in the First World War continue to be "veiled" by a number of distorting myths. The Lie tells the story of a returned soldier, Daniel Branwell, living in a cottage on the outskirts of the Cornish community in which he grew up. Centenary fiction, it seems, puts commemoration first. The myths of the war, enshrined in cultural memory for decades, remain at some levels, but at others seem to give way to something more basic.
