2024 #28 Sarah Watling, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future
The Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939 inspired many people from Britain and other countries to become involved in the fight against fascism and to defend alternative possibilities (communism, socialism, anarchism or democracy). Tomorrow Perhaps the Future tells the stories of a number of women, mostly writers, mostly British or American, some well known, some forgotten, who went to Spain to fight, to help in the war effort or to report what was happening, or by campaigning for the cause in their own countries. The women featured in the book, all supporters of the Republican side in the war, include Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Salaria Kea, Nancy Cunard, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Jessica Mitford, Nan Green, Simone Weil (very briefly) and Gerda Taro. Some but not all of them were Communist Party members or sympathisers.
This is not really as one reviewer suggested, a "feminist history" of the war - that would presumably be a book about the history of Spanish women in the war, and I do have at least one such book - this is a biography/history of a group of outsider women, writers and rebels from outside Spain, their involvement in the war and how it affected their lives and writing. It is written from a perspective that is clearly feminist (and sympathetic to these women's political convictions).
The book is divided into three sections, reflecting the progress of the war, Beginnings, Arrivals and Retreat, and each chapter within those sections focuses on two or three women. They spent various amounts of time actually in Spain - Jessica Mitford and Simone Weil were not able to spend long there before being forced to leave, some made more than one trip, and Salaria Kea was there as a nurse with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Virginia Woolf never went to Spain, and seems to have been drawn in to the cause with some reluctance, partly through her beloved nephew Julian Bell, but she spoke at a fundraiser for Basque refugees, and struggled to write about how to deal with tyranny and war in her book Three Guineas.
I found this book fascinating and thought provoking. I want to reread the whole book again, and to follow up some of the stories by reading more about their lives and their published writings. I really felt the author's disappointment and frustration when researching Salaria Kea, who never completed and published her attempts at a memoir of her experiences, and whose story Watling had to piece together from fragments in archives. The book is readable yet scholarly. Black and white photographs are reproduced within the text with a list of illustrations and credits at the end, after the extensive footnotes and before the index.
Very highly recommended to readers interested in the Spanish Civil War and the participants in the struggle whose stories are told here.
Rating: 4.7