I am a silly one. All that rambling back in October about G. C. Pain’s novel Surplus Women and I didn’t realise that the phrase “surplus women” was common currency in the years after the first world war. I spent the first few chapters of the novel wondering slightly when it was supposed to be set and of course had I done my research or been of an older generation, I would have known that Pain had announced the period setting in the very title itself. Maybe I should have read Virginia Nicholson’s excellent Singled Out – How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, before. Oh well, you can’t have it all. Suffice to say that this is a super social history that will no doubt inform my reading for many years to come.
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Monday, December 13, 2010
Singled Out!
I am a silly one. All that rambling back in October about G. C. Pain’s novel Surplus Women and I didn’t realise that the phrase “surplus women” was common currency in the years after the first world war. I spent the first few chapters of the novel wondering slightly when it was supposed to be set and of course had I done my research or been of an older generation, I would have known that Pain had announced the period setting in the very title itself. Maybe I should have read Virginia Nicholson’s excellent Singled Out – How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, before. Oh well, you can’t have it all. Suffice to say that this is a super social history that will no doubt inform my reading for many years to come.
