Say That We Saw Spain Die: British and American Women Writers and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

All of the writers who went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War had to cope with the differentness of Spain, with the fact that it was a foreign experience. How they handled that foreign experience, whether or not they found an entry point where they could cross the border between being an outsider to being an insider, why some writers were able to cross over and others halted: these are aspects of the outside/inside duality that this paper will bring to the surface in some of the writing of the period. The focus will be on the following women writers: Florence Farmborough, Helen Nicholson, Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Frances Davis, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner. This paper will argue that these women writers, although they came to Spain with different purposes — because they identified with Republican ideology, or to warn their home countries of the dangers of Red Spain, or to spur their home countries into action — shared a common struggle in attempting to become insiders to the war in Spain, and succeeded in varying and revealing degrees.