num_pages: 226
description: William was 'written in a rage in 1918; this extraordinary novel... is a passionate assertion of the futility of war' (the Spectator). Its author had been an actress and suffragette; after 1914 she worked at the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont and organised Concerts at the Front. William - an Englishman was written in a tent within sound of guns and shells; this 'stunning... terrifically good' novel (Radio 4's A Good Read) is in one sense a very personal book animated by fury and cynicism and in another a detached one; yet is always 'profoundly moving' (Financial Times).In the view of Persephone Books William is one of the greatest novels about war ever written: not the war of the fighting soldier or the woman waiting at home but the war encountered by Mr and Mrs Everyman wrenched away from their comfortable preoccupations - Socialism Suffragettism so gently mocked by Cicely Hamilton - and forced to be part of an almost dream-like horror (because they cannot at first believe what is happening to them). The scene when William and Griselda emerge after three idyllic weeks in a honeymoon cottage in the remote hills of the Belgian Ardennes and encounter German brutality in a small village is unforgettable. The book which won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse in 1919 is a masterpiece written with an immediacy and a grim realism reminiscent of an old-fashioned flickering newsreel.
language: English
title: William: An Englishman
publisher: Persephone Books