Wartime Norfolk: The Diary of Rachel Dhonau, 1941-1942
This diary was compiled for Mass-Observation, as part of a wider experiment in recording and understanding everyday behaviour and attitudes in contemporary Britain (the organisation began its work in 1937), and it testifies to the diversity and tensions of wartime experience as recorded by a sensitive and perceptive observer. Rachel Dhonau, a British citizen with German antecedents and many friends and relatives in the Rhineland, compiled her extraordinary diary in Sheringham, her home for most of her life. She records the medley of drama and banality characteristic of the home front during the Second World War with graphic and incisive economy.
The volume has been edited by Robert Malcolmson and Peter Searby, who provide a full explanation of the context for the work and further details of the writer's later life.
(2004, 269pp)
(ISBN: 0953829863)
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