The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

The postwar era was a transformative time for the world. World War I ended in November 1918, and many troops returned home in 1919. Many returning veterans and conservative social forces expected that life would return to traditional prewar patterns. Social changes caused by the war, however, were not easily overturned, and many people, including women, were reluctant to relinquish the roles and freedoms that they had been afforded during the state of emergency. These tensions created a great deal of social unrest and anxiety, providing the historical background for the novel and mirroring the tensions in the narrative.

World War I saw a “scale of violence unknown in any previous war” (“How Modern Weapons Changed Combat in the First World War.” Imperial War Museums). Modern weaponry and close-combat warfare caused terrible injuries, and amputation was often the only treatment against fatal infection. The scale and nature of the war caused an unprecedented number of amputees: an estimated total of more than “41,000 young male amputees in the United Kingdom alone” (Dixon Smith, Sarah, et al. “I Did Not Expect the Doctor to Treat a Ghost.” Pain Reports, vol. 8, no. 6, 2023). Men who had suffered amputations or other lasting physical injuries—especially facial injury— were hailed as heroes in theory, but in reality, they were often shunned and stigmatized. Harris’s character is used especially to explore this experience. Convalescent homes were hidden from sight, as at Penneston, about which Iris says, “Sometimes it seems as if the dead are more convenient than the wounded” (131).

Unemployment was a huge problem in the immediate aftermath of the war, when millions of men returned home to an economy damaged by war. To counter this and prioritize male employment, employers were required to return to prewar practices, meaning that most women were no longer legally eligible to keep their wartime jobs. The novel explores this through the younger female characters, especially those working at Wirrall’s Conveyance and in the Motorcycle and Aviation Club. Laws like this and the public’s negative attitudes toward women doing “men’s jobs” created tension and hardship for women who wanted or needed to work, especially widows or unmarried women. Millions of women had experienced the freedom and independence of work outside the home during the war, when the British authorities encouraged them to take up the roles left empty by fighting men. The partial loss of a generation of young men also made it increasingly difficult for women to become wives and mothers. Yet, when the war ended, most of these women were expected simply to recede into this domestic sphere. Having gotten a taste of financial independence and professional purpose, many resisted, heightening the social concerns about women’s “respectability” and proper role, as presented in the novel.

From 1918 until 1920, a deadly influenza pandemic swept the world, killing an estimated 228,000 in the UK and making 1918 the “first year on record in which deaths exceeded births” (“Fatalism and an Absence of Public Grief.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, 28 Oct. 2020). The novel recognizes this pandemic and its effects through the experiences of many characters who are bereaved or convalescing, including Constance, the Wirralls, and Mrs. Fog. The very young and the very old were most susceptible to the flu, cutting into the generations who had been less vulnerable to death as a direct result of war. This devastation added to the divisions around how to rebuild society. One example is Mrs. Fog, who begins to care less for duty and status as she recovers her health, leading to her pursuit of lost love.

These phenomena combined to catalyze female emancipation in the UK, and shifting cultural values resulted in changed perspectives that led to the “seize the day” attitude of the “Roaring ’20s.” This attitude—newly emerging in 1919—is embodied by the misses Morris in the novel. The novel presents and explores a variety of individual and social responses to these undercurrents, especially the increasing breakdown of socially constructed perceptions of sex and gender in the early 20th century.