"[A] background to our daily existence": War and Everyday Life in Frances Partridge's A Pacifist's War

Developing upon recent feminist criticism that explores the relationship between the domestic and the political in women's war writing of the First and Second World Wars, this essay examines Frances Partridge's little-discussed diary of the years 1939–1945, first published in 1978 as A Pacifist's War. Partridge's documentation of domestic daily life in rural England in this text is intimately connected to the articulation of her broader philosophical, political, and ethical views. Her personal philosophy of "intensity" and her pacifism are in part developed in response to her changing relationship to, and the shifting nature of, domestic everyday life during wartime. Partridge's personal philosophy and pacifism are analyzed in relation to the broader intellectual context of the Bloomsbury milieu to which she belonged, and comparisons are drawn to the dialectic between the domestic, everyday and political in A Pacifist's War and the autobiographical war writings of contemporaneous women writers including H.D. and Gertrude Stein.