Alice Kelly's Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death, and the First World War offers readers a striking glance into the ways that death is represented in narratives produced by women in the wartime and postwar periods. Kelly takes as her suppositional foundation the relationship between modernism and the First World War. By examining what she calls the “modernist war,” Kelly is able to explore how women writers on both the battlefront and the home front used their narratives to represent and remember wartime casualties (24).

Kelly begins her discussion by surveying narratives that capture intimate encounters with the dead among nurses working in hospitals, casualty clearing stations, ships, and ambulance trains. Interactions between nurses and dying men were up close and unprecedented, and Kelly illustrates the ways in which nurse narratives turned back to conservative literary tropes of the Victorian era to contextualize and commemorate the dead. Deathbed scenes, burial rituals, and settings in cemeteries attempted to convert the modern wartime hospital into a traditional site of mourning and commemoration. The purpose here was twofold: it would give the dying and their families a consolatory belief that the men were properly recognized and memorialized in death while providing the nurse with a framework from which she could derive meaning and comfort. Despite the desire to contextualize, there was often no redemptive quality in death scenes, little connection between the dying man and the working woman, which, as Kelly argues, demonstrates that deathbed scenes were “no longer adequate for the mass death the nurses attempted to represent” (54). War death, Kelly concludes, could not be contained by earlier, expired conventions—such conventions had “outgrown their usefulness, but there were not yet new [modes of mourning, narrative or otherwise,] to take their place” (54).

In the second section of the book, Kelly transitions from proximate experiences with death to more abstract modes of representation used by civilian writers who were removed from the war zone and did not witness war death firsthand. Kelly shows how writers, such as Katherine Mansfield and H. D., used their physical or metaphorical distance from the war to facilitate their literary experimentation. She turns to Mansfield's use of the letter genre to indicate how Mansfield, a noncombatant, “made combatant language a means of [her] modernist experimentation” (121), while H. D. incorporates more avant-garde modes of representation in her novel, Bid Me to Live (1960), which focuses on the war and the female body and the cinematic experience of mediating the war.

The third and strongest section of Kelly's volume studies literary representations of public memorial culture in the postwar world. Put simply, this is “the intersection of memorialization and modernism,” where Kelly discusses the ways in which commemorative culture affected modernist representations of death (196). Here, she puts Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield in conversation with one another and probes how each depicts a postwar culture of commemoration that was still very much in the process of formation. In her analyses of Jacob's Room (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Kelly reveals that Woolf creates absent soldiers (Jacob and Andrew, respectively) who die off stage. In her discussion of Jacob, Kelly argues that his physical absence and his empty room “functions as a cenotaph of sorts, an empty tomb,” that links him to the new memorial idea of the unknown warrior (200). While Woolf creates an absent soldier, imagined almost entirely through other people's impressions, Mansfield's “The Garden Party” presents a seemingly peaceful civilian death, with a present, whole, and visible corpse (209). Such a discussion allows Kelly to examine private versus public mourning practices and the ways in which public mourning becomes collective mourning through monuments and memorial culture.

The strength of Kelly's collection resides in the critical discussion it offers of depictions of death in modernist literature. Despite the number of war dead, scholarship examining nurse narratives remains limited; discussions of private and public commemoration in the field of literary modernism is also hauntingly sparse. Kelly examines an impressively wide range of writing by women and convinces readers that the enormous death toll of the war changed the way that death was perceived and represented in literature. This collection encourages scholars to think about the intertwining of modernism, war, and memorial culture and suggests that what we call “modernist experimentation” can be traced to the experiences of death in Britain's wartime and postwar contexts (240).

Kelly provides a tour de force through these female literary accounts, though her readings are limited to Western and white authors. She acknowledges in her introduction Santanu Das's urge toward war criticism that is more interdisciplinary and diversified, and it would have been worthwhile to point out the racial inequalities at work: that, as far as we know, there were no Black female nurses in Britain during the First World War and only eighteen African-American women served in the Army Nurse Corps stateside. “The story of the Negro nurse in World War I is not spectacular,” Aileen Cole Stewart, one of the first African-American nurses to care for the wounded and dying soldiers of the First World War, observes (“Ready to Serve,” American Journal of Nursing, 63, no. 9 [1963]: 85–87, at #). Still, it is a story certainly worth telling—indeed, one can only imagine how a vibrant collection such as Kelly's would be energized by the inclusion of racially diverse representations of wartime death.