Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library
- PDF / 721,463 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 109 Downloads / 158 Views
Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library Sara Haslam 1
# The Author(s) 2018
Abstract This article is about the relationship between reading, trauma and responsive literary caregiving in Britain during the First World War. Its analysis of two little-known documents describing the history of the War Library, begun by Helen Mary Gaskell in 1914, exposes a gap in the scholarship of war-time reading; generates a new narrative of "how," "when," and "why" books went to war; and foregrounds gender in its analysis of the historiography. The Library of Congress's T. W. Koch discovered Gaskell's ground-breaking work in 1917 and reported its successes to the American Library Association. The British Times also covered Gaskell's library, yet researchers working on reading during the war have routinely neglected her distinct model and method, skewing the research base on war-time reading and its association with trauma and caregiving. In the article's second half, a literary case study of a popular war novel demonstrates the extent of the "bitter cry for books." The success of Gaskell's intervention is examined alongside H. G. Wells's representation of textual healing. Reading is shown to offer sick, traumatized and recovering combatants emotional and psychological caregiving in ways that she could not always have predicted and that are not visible in the literary/historical record. Keywords First world war . Reading . Trauma . Literary caregiving . Helen Mary Gaskell . War library In July 1937, the Book Trolley, the magazine of the guild of hospital librarians, published a brief history of libraries in hospitals. Owing to the writer’s (self-confessed) advanced age and poor health, the piece was shorter than it might have been. Mrs. Gaskell, C.B.E., knew that in different circumstances she could have written Ba good deal on the Past.^ But she welcomed the opportunity to provide an account of the Bdifficulties and influences^ under which libraries in hospitals had begun, and she returned to two international conflicts to do so: the Boer War
* Sara Haslam [email protected]
1
Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Science (FASS), The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
J Med Humanit
and the First World War (1937, 203). The piece she produced was indeed short, numbering only four pages. However, in 1918 Gaskell had written a longer and more specific version of her history. The Red Cross and Order of St John War Library was published by the Red Cross in 1918 and provided a detailed account of the establishment and operation of the War Library which she herself founded in 1914. This article is about Helen Mary Gaskell’s War Library and the model of literary caregiving on which it was founded – and so it is also concerned with the early history of what would become known as bibliotherapy.1 Gaskell chose a quotation from Titus Andronicus to head her 1918 pamphlet: BTake choice of all my Library, and so beguile thy sorrow^ (1918, 1). The second h
Data Loading...
