The Second World War in Contemporary Women's Fiction: Revisiting the Home Front

In three recent novels centring on British women’s experience of the Second World War – Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch (2006) , Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life (2013) , and Alison MacLeod’s Unexploded (2013) – the exploration of women’s contribution to the war effort is tempered by an acknowledgement of the temporary and limited nature of the opportunities the war offered. The disruption of narrative linearity and the incorporation, within narratives of the past, of considerations of the future often tinged with anxiety or disappointment, are the principal means by which these authors attempt to show both the gains and the losses that were the lot of British women during the Second World War.