Eva Dobell

Eva Dobell (1867-1963) was a British poet, nurse, and editor, best known for her poems on the effects of World War I and her regional poems.

Contents

Biography

The daughter of a wine merchant and local historian from Cheltenham, and the niece of the Victorian poet Sydney Dobell, she composed one volume of poetry before volunteering as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in World War I, during which she also took part in the morale-boosting work of writing to prisoners of war.

Poetry

While she was also known in her time as a regional poet[1] (one of her Gloucestershire poems was recently set to music[2]), Dobell is best-known today for her occasional poems from the war period, which all describe wounded soldiers, their experiences, and their bleak prospects.[3] A few of these poems are widely dispersed on the internet, and these continue to receive some scholarly acknowledgment. "Night Duty," for instance, is cited as one of many poems by female war-poets and nurses that provide access to an experience rarely shared by male poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.[4] Perhaps the most frequently reproduced is "Pluck," especially on sites dedicated to the Great War.[5] "Pluck" also found its way into printed anthologies such as The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War,[6] and was even set to music.[7]

After the war, she continued to write; in all, she published half a dozen books of poetry, a verse drama, and edited a book of poems by Lady Margaret Sackville.

Bibliography

Well-known poems

Books of poetry

[8]

Verse drama

Book edited

Anthologies

References

  1. ^ Evidenced by her inclusion in S. Fowler Wright, ed. The County Series of Contemporary Poetry No. VII, an anthology of poems by poets from or near Gloucester.
  2. ^ "Tom's Long Post" on Johnny Coppin's The Gloucestershire Collection.
  3. ^ Lusty, Heather (Summer 2008). "Looking Back: New Studies in the Literature of Twentieth-Century War". Journal of Modern Literature 31 (4): 145–51. doi:10.1353/jml.0.0014. "Their elegiac poems, characterized by a sense of mourning, emphasized the suffering they witnessed in the injured, often with arresting candor"  Lusty is speaking of "female medical persona like May Sinclair, Vera Brittain, Mary Henderson, and Eva Dobell, working in dressing stations and hospitals."
  4. ^ Cummings, Randy (1995). "Female Poets of the First World War: A Study in the Diversity for the Fifth Grade Social Studies Curriculum". Poetry In and Out of the Classroom: Essays from the ACLS Elementary and Secondary Schools Teacher Curriculum Development Project. American Council of Learned Societies: Occasional Paper No. 29. http://archives.acls.org/op/op29cummings.htm. Retrieved 2008-12-08. "Their intimate knowledge of suffering and death influenced women to write verse stripped of the sentimental and jingoistic." 
  5. ^ For instance, "Pluck" on From The Trenches, and on First World War Poetry.
  6. ^ Vincent Sherry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. ISBN 9780521528979.
  7. ^ Seven Ages: An Anthology of Poetry with Music. Naxos Audio Books, 2000.
  8. ^ Dowson, Jane; Entwistle, Alice (2005). A History of Twentieth-century British Women's Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. p. 312. ISBN 9780521819466. http://books.google.com/?id=JMtqyxmo5j8C&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=eva+dobell .
  9. ^ Table of contents at The County Series of Contemporary Poetry No. VII.