Fighting France

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist and a short story writer. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1921, for The Age of Innocence). She was also one of the few foreigners allowed to travel to the front lines in France during the First World War. Her articles written about this period were collected in Fighting France. Throughout the war Wharton worked with refugees and in 1916 she was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in recognition of her support for the displaced. Alice Kelly is the Harmsworth Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her critical edition of Edith Wharton’s First World War reportage, Fighting France was published by EUP in December 2015 and she co-edited a Special Issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies on ‘Katherine Mansfield and the First World War’ (EUP, September 2014).

Alice Kelly's new edition of the journalism of Edith Wharton in First World War France is a valuable contribution to the literary history of the conflict. Here is a novelist, using all her skills as an eye witness to tell unknowing Americans of the staggering nature of a war the world had never seen before. A wonderful text, introduced with wit and authority.

• Note on the Text; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Wharton in Wartime; Fighting France; Further Reading; Notes.