Between the 1870s and the 1930s in England an unprecedented number of women writers entered the public sphere as essayists. Whereas George Eliot established the Victorian ‘woman of letters’ as a commanding presence, a generation later the New Woman arose as a complex figure shaping ‘The Woman Question’ for twentieth-century writers like Virginia Woolf. This period between the Victorian and modernist eras saw an increase in women’s political writing on suffrage and the anti-war movement. Yet, the literary place of women’s protest writing in this period remains opaque. Focusing on Woolf’s experiments with a hybrid ‘novel-essay’ in The Years and Three Guineas alongside Vernon Lee’s political essays as precursors, this chapter argues that the modern literary essay developed in tandem with the protest essay. This approach allows for a consideration of the political stakes and achievements of hybrid experiments with the essay that revealed the inseparability of politics and aesthetics.

Chapter 7 examines veterans’ reflections on key war legacies in light of their return journeys. After the war, veterans grappled with complex and politically charged narratives about the war that shaped how they viewed their individual experiences. Those that returned to Việt Nam faced new stories and memories about the war that challenged these narratives. Rather than challenging their views, the experience of returning to Việt Nam often reinforced their existing values and beliefs, and many returnees drew from return experiences to support their existing views. This chapter situates returnees’ views in broader historiographical debates on four key issues: perceptions of defeat (or victory) in Vietnam, the anti-war movement, the association between “their” war and war crimes, and the justness of the war. The majority of veterans raised these key legacy issues in their interviews without prompting, indicating how polarizing and contentious the Vietnam War continues to be.