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The aesthetics of loss: German women’s art of the First World War

historical event’ (p. 134). In exploring the hold which the war continued to exert on mid and late-twentieth-century short story writers, from Frances Bellby in the 1950s and Robert Graves in the 1960s to Julian Barnes in the 1990s and Ann Perry in the 2000s, Einhaus writes perceptively about the weight of accumulated meanings each successive generation of writers has had to deal with as the war recedes further into history. This book is an important addition to our knowledge of wartime literature. Its style is lucid and easy to read; theoretical perspectives are introduced lightly but deftly, and whilst Einhaus makes a very persuasive case for this lost fictional material being interesting on all kinds of levels, there is a real effort to make the stories speak for themselves. My impulse on finishing the book was the desire to hunt out the authors and stories discussed here and read them in full. This is not to say there are no gaps. It would be useful perhaps to get more of a sense of what the authors featured in her study thought they were doing. For instance, why did they choose to write in this format? And whilst The Strand features heavily, as does The English Review, the focus can seem a bit telescopic; there were other popular magazines too: Nash’s and Pall Mall, Pearson’s, the Bystander. What was their policy as regards the short story during the war? These, however, are minor quibbles. Overall this book will prove an immensely valuable resource both for university teachers and students, but also – if it gets issued in affordable paperback – the interested general reader, too.