This is an epilogue to the Chelsea reading event – Reality more astonishing than fiction, where attendees asked me to recommend the WWI books about women that I used for my research.
We read extracts from letters and diaries – which were sad, feisty and funny.
Elsie Bowerman captured everybody’s imagination. In the style of Indiana Jones, Miss Brown and Miss Bowerman clambered onto a moving train and saved the Scottish Women’s Hospital’s equipment.
Mabel Dearmer, author and illustrator, kept a diary and sent letters home from Kragujevac (Serbia) in spring 1915. She joined the Mabel Stobart’s Hospital unit. Her husband, Percy Dearmer served as a chaplain with the unit. Several women – nurses, doctors, orderlies – from various British medical missions died in Serbia during the typhus epidemic in 1915. Mabel Dearmer was one of them. See the extract from her letter from 6th June 1915.
Finally, if you would like to hear more about Scottish Women’s Hospitals and Dr Elsie Inglis, come to my talk at Women’s Library, LSE, on 9th November, 1-2pm.
Our next Reading event is on Tuesday, 11th December at Chelsea Library, (contact the library for more details), where we will visit Mr Scrooge. Come and join us reading extracts from “A Christmas Carol”.
by
Zvezdana Popovic
My recommended book list: Women and WWI / Suffragists and Suffragettes
- Kate Adie, Fighting on the home front. The legacy of women in World War One.
- Lucinda Hawksley: March women march
- Simon Webb, The Suffragette Bombers. Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists.
- Elisabeth Shipton, Female Tommies: The Frontline Women of the First World War
About Flora Sandes:
- Louise Miller, A Fine brother. The life of Captain Flora Sendes, Alma Books, 2012.
- (Book translated by LAGUNA “Naš brat”)
About Dr Elsie Inglis and Scottish Women’s Hospitals:
- Leah Leneman: In the Service of Life. The story of Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. Edinburgh: The Mercat Press, 1994.
- Leah Leneman, Elsie Inglis. Founder of battlefront hospitals run entirely by women, NMSE, 1998
- Eileen Crofton : Angels of Mercy: A Women’s Hospital on the Western Front 1914 1918, Birlinn Ltd, 2013.
- Mikic, translated by Dr. Muriel Heppell: The Life and Work of Dr. Katherine S. MacPhail
- Eva Shaw McLaren: Elsie Inglis. The woman with the torch.
- Monica Krippner, The Quality of Mercy. Women at War. Serbia 1915-18.
- Isabel Emslie Hutton: With a Woman’s Unit in Serbia, Salonika and Sebastopol.
- Mabel Stobart, The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere
Most of these books can be borrowed in local libraries and some of old ones can be read online, on the Project Gutenberg Free Books website.
Websites and documentary films
- Scottish Women’s Hospitals
- Scarlet Finders – British Military Nurses.
- Novica Babovic – (YouTube, 11 minutes)
- The women who went to war – Alan Cumming
- Scottish Women’s Hospitals – A.Cumming (YouTube, 41 minutes).
- The Story of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals by Scottish Parliament – (YouTube, 5 minutes).
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