The War-Workers

Delafield, E. M., 1890-1943Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.6

Word count: 435K words
Chapters: 44

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The War-Workers by E. M. DelafieldAuthor: Delafield, E. M., 1890-1943,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Aug 23, 2011

Editor's review

This novel by the British writer E. M. Delafield is set against the backdrop of English society around the First World War, focusing on women's experiences and circumstances as they took on various kinds of work during wartime. The work continues the author's forte for social observation and understated irony, using everyday details to show characters pulled between duty, class, and self-identity. For readers who want to understand the history of English women's lives in the early twentieth century and the social landscape of the wartime home front, this book offers a concrete and richly literary slice of that world. As a Project Gutenberg public-domain e-book, it is easily accessible and well suited as supplementary reading for English literature courses or book-club discussions of war and gender. While reading, note the narrator's subtle judgments of characters' words and actions, and the social conventions revealed in scene transitions.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers interested in First World War-era English society and women's history
Literary readers who enjoy novels of manners and understated irony
Students in English literature courses studying war and gender
Readers who want free access to public-domain English classics

Not a good fit for

Readers of popular fiction who prefer strong plots and fast-paced narrative
Complete beginners unfamiliar with early twentieth-century English social context

Reading tips

First learn the basic background on British women's employment and home-front mobilization during the First World War, then enter the text.
Pay attention to the gap between the narrator's tone and the characters' dialogue to appreciate the author's social irony.
Read alongside other wartime women's writing and note the differences in how each work presents work.
When reading the English original, mark class forms of address and everyday expressions to help understand character relationships.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Do I need to know First World War history in advance to read this book?

It is not required, but basic background will noticeably improve comprehension. The novel involves wartime home-front work and changing social roles; if you understand the general situation of British wartime mobilization and women entering the workforce, it is easier to grasp the characters' circumstances and the narrator's ironic targets.

How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for non-native readers?

The work is an early twentieth-century English novel, with sentence patterns and vocabulary characteristic of its period; non-native readers may need to look up some social forms of address and everyday expressions. It is best suited to readers with intermediate or higher English reading ability who are willing to read slowly.

This is a public-domain book; is the quality of the edition reliable?

This edition comes from Project Gutenberg and is a public-domain electronic text suitable for reading and research. Public-domain books usually have no modern scholarly annotations; if you need detailed background information, you can pair it with relevant historical or literary introductions.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Delafield, E. M., 1890-1943 Author · British · 1890–1943

E. M. Delafield (1890–1943) was a British novelist, born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture. With a delicate yet biting touch, she portrayed the daily lives and emotional predicaments of middle- and upper-class Englishwomen between the two world wars, excelling at diary form and irony to reveal her characters' self-deception and social pressure. Her best-known work, Diary of a Provincial Lady, uses the diary form to depict a country housewife's vanity and anxiety, earning her a place in the tradition of English humorous writing. The library also holds her works The War-Workers, which concerns wartime social roles, and Consequences, which explores a woman's choice between marriage and independence. Public information is limited; her fiction centers on women's circumstances, class manners, and family relations, written in a light tone with an undercurrent of critique, and has influenced later women's writing and satirical fiction.