Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942
10 best books like Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942 (Joyce Dennys): Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of 'Housewife, 49', Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949, Saplings, Miss Ranskill Comes Home, Bluebirds, Cluny Brown, Marling Hall, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Miss Hargreaves, Doreen
Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of 'Housewife, 49'
In September 1939, housewife and mother Nella Last began a diary whose entries, in their regularity, length and quality, have created a record of the Second World War which is powerful, fascinating and unique.
When war broke out, Nella's younger son joined the army while the rest of the family...
Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949
| Author | Virginia Nicholson |
| ISBN | 0670917788 |
In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's Second World War, through a host of individual women's experiences. We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women...
| Author | Noel Streatfeild |
| ISBN | 1903155053 |
Downer! That's not exactly a criticism, but man, if you're used to Streatfeild's kid lit about children learning arts and overcoming personal and economic challenges you will not be expecting this grim account of a family collapsing under the pressures and changes of the second world war. This is one...
| Author | Barbara Bower |
| ISBN | 1903155363 |
Published in 1946, under her married name, Barbara Bower.
Description: Tells the tale of a woman who goes on a cruise and is swept overboard. She lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she...
| Author | Margaret Mayhew |
| ISBN | 0552152439 |
1939 - And in the back of a three-ton lorry, a strangely assorted group of young women bumped over the road to RAF Colston. They were the first of the WAAFs.
Barmaids mixed with secretaries and debutantes. They had appalling living quarters and no uniforms. And, worst of all, the Station Commander,...
| Author | Margery Sharp |
| ISBN | 0060805781 |
Note: I see that when I originally posted this to my shelf (book was read in March) I forgot to include my little review. I was quite taken with Margery Sharp's writing and hope to read more:
Author's Quote added: "I absolutely believe it is fatal ever to write below your best, even if what you write...
| Author | Angela Thirkell |
| ISBN | 0786702737 |
This dry comedy of manners, set in a parochial England that was rapidly disappearing under the threat of Nazi Germany, was the first of Thirkell's increasingly dark novels written during World War II. But the placid surface of middle-class life in towns such as Marling Melicent--where a bohemian,...
| Author | Mollie Panter-Downes |
| ISBN | 0953478076 |
For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes' name was associated with "The New Yorker", for which she wrote a regular 'Letter from London', book reviews and over thirty short stories; of the twenty-one in "Good Evening, Mrs Craven", written between 1939 and 1944, only two had ever been reprinted - these very...
When Norman Huntley and Henry Beddow, sheltering from the rain in a dismal Irish country church, placate the sexton by telling him that they knew of his beloved pastor (now departed), there is no reason to suppose that there is any harm in the invention. It is purely for their own amusement that they create...
| Author | Barbara Noble |
| ISBN | 1903155509 |
Doreen's mother is torn. In World War 2 London, the blitz has begun. Almost all of Doreen's classmates have already been sent to safety in the country, but Mrs. Rawlings doesn't believe in separating children from their parents, even in wartime. But the bombings are growing progressively worse.
"Things...
| Author | Denis Mackail |
| ISBN | 1903155258 |
PG Wodehouse described this novel as 'so good that it makes one feel that it's the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader all about them.'
Greenery Street can be read on two levels - it is a touching description of a young couple's first year together...
| Author | Vere Hodgson |
| ISBN | 0953478084 |
Vere Hodgson worked for a Notting Hill Gate charity during the Second World War ; being sparky and unflappable, she was not going to let Hitler make a difference to her life, but the beginning of the Blitz did, which is why she began her published diaries on 25 June 1940: 'Last night at about 1 a.m. we had the...
The Provincial Lady in London
| Author | E.M. Delafield |
| ISBN | 0897330854 |
These highly acclaimed, delightful novels are written in diary form by the Provincial Lady, who lives in a country house with her husband, two children, the children's French governess, Cook and a few assorted helpers. The era of the 1930s is wittily and shrewdly recreated with amusing illustrations....
| Author | D.E. Stevenson |
| ISBN | 0030014360 |
Tenth May, 1934. At this moment I look up and see the Man Who Lives Next Door standing on his doorstep watching my antics, and disapproving (I feel sure) of my flowered silk dressing gown. Probably his own wife wears one of red flannel, and most certainly has never been seen leaning out of the window in it...
We Are At War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times
| Author | Simon Garfield |
| ISBN | 0091903874 |
Of all the accounts written about the Second World War, none are more compelling than the personal diaries of those who lived through it. We Are At War is the story of five everyday folk, who, living on the brink of chaos, recorded privately on paper their most intimate hopes and fears.
Pam Ashford,...
The Brontës Went to Woolworths
| Author | Rachel Ferguson |
| ISBN | 1608190536 |
'How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters'; so proclaims Deirdre at the beginning of The Brontës Went to Woolworths, one of three sisters.
London, 1931. As growing up looms large in the lives of the Carne sisters, Deirdre, Katrine and young Sheil still share an insatiable...
| Author | Ada Leverson |
| ISBN | 1608190501 |
The heroine of Love's Shadow is the delightful Edith Ottley. She lives with her husband Brace and her two children in a very new, very small, very white flat in Knightsbridge. As we follow Edith's fortunes we enter the enchanting world of Edwardian London, bewitched by the courtships, jealousies and...
