I want to read about life in Great Britain during WWII

December 28, 2019 7:45 AM

I want to read about everyday life in Great Britain during WWII. Nonfiction is strongly preferred, but great novels will probably also make it onto my TBR list. I’m looking for accounts of how ordinary people who were not in the military lived during that period. Any suggestions?
posted by bookmammal to Media & Arts (17 answers total)

Persephone Books, a superb small press, has published a number of women's accounts from the time,such as diaries, etc.
posted by tavegyl at 7:51 AM on December 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

Living Through The Blitz, compiled by Tom Harrison, was one of the first books to draw on Mass Observation reports and diaries. It only covers the actual Blitz, so just late 1940 through mid-1941, but I read it years ago and found it interesting.
posted by Frowner at 7:55 AM on December 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Mrs. Milburn's Diaries: An Englishwoman's Day to Day Reflections, 1939-45

Read it several years ago and from what I remember, it was very day to day... rationing, gardening, the WI. Her son was captured in 1939 and spent nearly the whole war in a POW camp and I think this was her way of keeping him up to date with what happened while he was away.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:34 AM on December 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Waiting for the All Clear is a collection of accounts from survivors of the Blitz.
posted by FencingGal at 8:47 AM on December 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

There’s a trilogy of Mass Observation books about the war and just after compiled by Simon Garfield.

Joan Wyndham's wartime diaries are from the POV of a young bohemian.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 8:48 AM on December 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Orwell's London Letters should be of interest. I believe several of them are reprinted in Vol. 4 of "Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters".
posted by thelonius at 8:55 AM on December 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Also from Mass Observation are the diaries of Nella Last, these were made into an excellent tv show called Housewife, 49.
posted by plonkee at 9:21 AM on December 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Seconding Housewife, 49, if you can find it; I haven't read the original diaries. Some novels that were written later but that are well-researched include Pat Barker's Noonday, and two books by Kate Atkinson: Life After Life and A God in Ruins.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 10:09 AM on December 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

This book, “How We Lived Then”, might be worth a look.
posted by MadamM at 10:24 AM on December 28, 2019

Wartime Farm is a TV documentary by Ruth Goodman which is frustratingly not available in a format compatible with American DVD players but is usually on Youtube in uploads of varying quality. It's wonderful and worth watching. The associated book is not available at my library so I can't review it but probably also worthwhile.
posted by Botanizer at 10:31 AM on December 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Seconding Nella Last.

I've read several of these. Apologies for the links to my own reviews.

Mrs Miles’s Diary: The Wartime Journal of a Housewife on the Home Front. Non-fiction.
Family Post Bag. Fiction in letter format.
Betty’s Wartime Diary, 1939-1945. Non-fiction.
Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. Fiction.

These Wonderful Rumours!: A Young Schoolteachers’ Wartime Diaries. (Not my review.) Non-fict. (I found this one a bit dull.)

The Captive Reader, linked above, has some other war diary reviews - Mrs Milburn's Diaries, Mollie Panter-Downes's War Notes.

You might like How the Girl Guides Won the War by Janie Hampton

There are some good links and recommendations here - scroll down for the home front ones.

In novels, there is also The Provincial Lady in Wartime (Gutenberg text). I really like this series but I know the style is a bit Marmite.

Some of DE Stevenson's novels might work for you, but I'm not sure which to recommend.

Juliet Gardiner's non-fiction is worth looking at:
Wartime: Britain 1939-1945
The 1940s House (book of the television programme - there may be some of the programme on YouTube)
Millions Like Us: Women's Lives During the Second World War
The Children's War: The Second World War Through the Eyes of the Children of Britain
The Blitz: The British Under Attack (I haven't read the last one).

Books from the time for children and teenage readers can be very good for domestic details, including to do with the war. This may be too obscure for you but Catherine Christian's Harriet: The Return of Rip Van Winkle is worth reading for a particular sense of the war.

Jenny Hartley's Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War is very good and you'd probably find some other novelists you'd be interested in through it.

A Few Eggs and No Oranges is another non-fiction account you might like (though it is very long).

Dorothy Sayers wrote some articles in the early part of the war as fictional letters between her characters: The Wimsey Papers.

Not a contemporary novel, but you might enjoy Goodnight, Mr Tom.

There are several bloggers who often write about Second World War fiction, Furrowed Middlebrow and Dove Grey Reader being the first two to come to mind.

And one more diary - The View from the Corner Shop: Diary of a Wartime Shop Assistant, by Kathleen Hey. This is a different perspective from some of the others - much emphasis on rationing - but for me it was slightly too dull.

Oh, and one more - I haven't read this, but A Woman Living in the Shadow of the Second World War: Helena Hall's Journal from the Home Front might be interesting.

I may come back if I think of some more. There are a lot around.
posted by paduasoy at 12:08 PM on December 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

Dorothy L. Sayers has been mentioned but her Wimsey/Vane series is very very well continued by Jill Patton Walsh and Presumption of Death is set in an English village in Herts during the war. It illustrates very vividly the rural wartime, including things like grain rationing for laying hens, the black market, pig shares, shortages, evacuees, etc in the natural narrative.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:48 PM on December 28, 2019

DarlingBri's suggestion made me think of Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin - fiction, good on the end of the war in London. Several other Allinghams also have wartime settings.
posted by paduasoy at 1:53 PM on December 28, 2019

Seconding all the Mass-Observation stuff above, especially Nella Last and the three books edited by Simon Garfield (also I like These Wonderful Rumors more than paduasoy does :) ). Also, if you can get them through abebooks or similar, the diaries of George Beardmore, Olivia Cockett, Rachel Dhonau, Naomi Mitchison, and Frances Partridge. (I may or may not be a little obsessed with diaries of this period...).
posted by huimangm at 3:59 PM on December 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Murder on the Home Front. It's a charming little book with discussions of murder cases from the secretary of the coroner of London in 1941.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 4:04 PM on December 28, 2019

Adding Angus Calder's The People's War. Non-fict.
posted by paduasoy at 6:21 PM on December 28, 2019

Forgot one of the most interesting, Working for Victory: A Diary of Life in a Second World War Factory. Can't find a good review online, but it's the joint diary of two middle-aged, middle-class women who worked at a factory during the war.

Also, not a book, but if you haven't seen Diary for Timothy I think you'd find it interesting.

And another children's book, Carrie's War - although it's a novel, it is apparently partly based on the writer's experiences as an evacuee.

Apologies, bookmammal, I'm not sure where you're based - if you're British the two children's books I have mentioned will almost certainly be familiar to you.
posted by paduasoy at 7:54 PM on December 28, 2019