Letters, Morale and Gender: Discourses of Letter-writing in the Second World War

My aim in this article is two fold: firstly to explore the practical and ideological importance of letter-writing in Britain and the States during the war, particularly between women at home and men in the forces, and secondly, to draw attention to the sense in which letter-writing was more than simply a means of communication, but a new forum for popular creativity. In both of these respects, we need to read letters now as texts that bear no simple relationship to historical narratives but with the kind of methodology that literary critics have been developing in the field of epistolary studies.