William – an Englishman

PREFACE BY NICOLA BEAUMAN
248pp
ISBN 9780953478002

William - an Englishman (1919) is one of the greatest novels to emerge from World War One: not the war of the fighting soldier or the woman waiting at home, but the war experienced by an ordinary young couple. William and Griselda, both passionate activists in the Suffragette movement, ‘cocksure, contemptuous, intolerant, self-sacrificing after the manner of their kind’, are shocked out of their everyday complacency when, in August 1914, they emerge from their honeymoon cottage in the remote hills of the Belgian Ardennes and hear what they think is the sound of thunder. It is in fact the guns of the German army. ‘Enthusiastic, ignorant, they had thought of their little political scuffles as war and stumbled accidentally into the other kind of war – of bullets and blood and high explosives.’

Cicely Hamilton wrote William - an Englishman in a rage in the early months of 1918. At the time she was volunteering in northern France, organising concerts to entertain the troops, the sound of gunfire a nightly accompaniment to her scribbling. We are perhaps used to war poets writing poems in these circumstances; we are not so used to women writing novels. Her style has a powerful immediacy to it reminiscent of a flickering newsreel.

In 1919 this intense, furious, highly original novel won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse, which at the time was the top prize in the world for a woman writer. It then unaccountably fell out of print until, eighty years later, it became the very first title on the Persephone Books list. Now comes this new edition so that even more readers can discover William - an Englishman.

‘From first page to last this is a masterpiece, and its rigid restraint adds a thousandfold to its value. It was written, we think, out of a great pity, a great love, deep indignation and a white-hot righteous anger.’ (The Englishwoman, September 1919)

Also available as a Persephone Classic.

For more on William - an Englishman, have a look at the Persephone Perspective.

Endpaper

The endpaper fabric is an Omega Workshop linen, dating from 1913 when the novel begins. With its pattern of abstract shapes outlined in black 'Pamela' has an appropriate austerity; yet the soft curves evoke the Belgian hills and the blue, green and purple recall the suffragette colours.

Picture Caption

A WWI munitions worker.