ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the social and historical context of the post-war years and is concerned with the representation of childhood and how such representations reflect the evidence of the post-war strain on the population. It highlights a strand of psychoanalytic sympathy expressed on the part of women writers, namely ambivalence. The chapter presents how the post-war reconstruction of family and relationships is attempted in fiction and identifies how some post-war mothers struggle with complex and contradictory feelings toward their children as adulthood approaches. Superior emotional resistance to stress when facing wartime pressures may have been observed more frequently in women than men among the Tavistock Clinic patients, but once the war ended, there was a flurry of cases of civilian mental and physical collapse. The writing of women at the end of the war is sensitive to the real lives and difficulties experienced by many women and families as peace returned.
