ABSTRACT
This article explores the popularity of the short story in the Second World War, arguing that for writers including Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Rose Macaulay and William Sansom the short story formed a kind of war diary, assuaging their need to witness authentically the history they were participating in as firemen, ambulance drivers or Air Raid Precautions (ARP) wardens. Focusing on stories set in London, the article suggests that the short story was unusually appropriate for representing the bombing war because both the short story and the bombing incident are structured around a single protracted moment or series of moments. So too, partly because of its temporality, which prevents the kind of extended rational analysis common in novels, the short story is conducive to representing the strange or unseen. In a war that saw the dismantling of the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, and living and dead, the short story came into its own as a form well-suited for what is here termed ‘unrealistic realism’ or what Elizabeth Bowen called ‘lucid abnormality’. This is an aesthetic in which realist documentary narratives can be peopled with ghosts, making it possible for Bowen to describe her wartime ghost stories as ‘the only diary I have kept’.
