Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War - Softcover

This is as stark and acidic a collection of war stories as you will read in a long time. Stripped bare of the sentimentalism attached to love in wartime, writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Beryl Bainbridge and Dorothy Pareker provide poignant, wry, subversive tales about lovers and married couples... Revelatory reading. (SCOTSMAN)

Not all the best war stories are told by men...Each story gives a glimpse into the special circumstances of wartime and the life led by ordinary women of courage and compassion. No guns or battles but plenty of poignant drama. (TORQUAY HERALD EXPRESS)

Wish me Luck as you Wave me Goodbye' went the jaunty wartime song and that was what the brave-faced women did as they bid their men fond farewell. This collection of short stories written by women when war was a way of life includes some of the finest writers of that generation such as Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Rose Macaulay, Stevie Smith and Elizabeth Taylor. War had traditionally been seen as a masculine occupation but these stories show how women were equal if different participants. They reveal hardship, isolation and deprivation suffered by most women who also felt left behind as their men moved on. By turn comical, stoical, compassionate, angry and subversive these intensely individual voices bring a human dimension to the momentous events that reverberated around them and each opens a window on to a hidden landscape of war.