Confessions of Love

This pacy novel, published in 1935, is set in central Japan and describes the modernising society of the 1920s in which young progressive women sought to break with tradition. The narrator and central character, Yuasa Joji, is a young artist in a broken marriage and he tells about his several affairs with young women. The novel draws heavily on the actual experience of Togo Seiji. The author had contacted Togo (his surname) as part of her research for another novel, seeking to give an accurate representation of a gas-inhalation suicide, and they ended up spending the following five years together. It took him a year to tell her all his reminiscences of his several romances.

The author, Uno Chiyo (born 28 November 1897), had a traditional, restrictive upbringing in provincial society in southwestern Japan. Her father died in 1913 and she moved to Tokyo in 1917 and worked for a short time in a restaurant frequented by writers. She married soon after moving to the city and went to live in Sapporo. Having won a newspaper competition for short stories, Uno (her surname) moved back to Tokyo, abandoning her marriage, to pursue a literary career. Her most highly regarded work, the novella, Ohan, was published in 1957 and won the Noma Literary Prize for the most outstanding work published that year in Japan.

The artist, Joji (his forename), goes to great lengths to pursue his romantic interests. In one scene, he travels to a remote mountain estate during a severe storm in an attempt to rescue his beloved Tsuyuko from captivity in her grandparents’ home. In order to get there, he pays a driver to take him there from the railway station. The driver is fatally injured in an avalanche when making his return journey. Joji  considers his responsibility for the accident:
“Was this man going to die? Was he going to die like a poor dog, helpless in this strange house where they couldn't even get a doctor? Because he had driven me? The men stopped trying to help him further and an eerie silence ensued while we waited the few moments until he died.”

We Have Been Warned

In this novel, published in 1935, the author imagines a violent right-wing counter-revolution in England in opposition to the perceived threat of a Soviet-leaning Labour movement. In the foreword, she explains that “the final chapters of the book were written before the events of summer 1933 in Germany and before the counter-revolutions of 1934 in Austria and Spain”. The central characters are a married couple, Dione and Tom Galton. He lectures in Oxford and campaigns as a parliamentary candidate in the industrial north. She is from the Scottish highlands and has political sympathies somewhat further left than her husband's kind of socialism. Their socialist views harden following a visit to the Soviet Union.

The author, Naomi Mitchison (born 1 November 1897), was born in Edinburgh and grew up in an academic family, receiving her education in Oxford. On leaving school, she began to study for a science degree but abandoned the course on the outbreak of the First World War to train as a nurse. She served in a Voluntary Aid Detachment at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. She married in 1916; her husband, Richard Mitchison, was on leave from service on the Western Front. He was a friend of her brother, John Haldane, who fought with the Black Watch regiment in France and Mesopotamia. Her literary career began in 1923 and lasted some 75 years; of her 90 books, she is perhaps most highly regarded for her historical fiction.

Whereas the novel deals with the general political situation that arose in the aftermath of the First World War, it also documents the impact that the war had on the lives of individual characters. Dione Galton’s sister, Phoebe,  is married to Robin, a man with a war injury: “his leg had been bothering him again, there was probably still a tiny piece of shell in it, evading the X-rays — just enough to set up a kind of mild general poisoning from time to time.” Robin’s brother had been killed at the Somme in 1916. Donald, a friend of Dione from her childhood home in Scotland, is a Communist activist and obtains from a former serviceman “a souvenir of the Great War... an old Mills bomb, Mark 5, still undetonated”. This he uses to assassinate a political opponent, leading to his enforced exile in Ukraine. Her husband, Tom, is asked by a student about his service in the war:
“ ‘But you remember the European War?’
‘Quite definitely. Especially in wet weather.’
‘Why?’
‘My wound begins to play tricks then....’
‘But I didn't know you'd been wounded! It must have been a marvellous time.’
‘Marvellous? Haven't you read any war books?’
‘Oh yes. I adore them. You know that superb scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, the men sitting on boxes in the mud and...’
‘...Well, never mind, if the National Government goes on as it's doing at present there'll probably be another war in your time.’ ”

Winged Victory

This masterpiece of pathos and poetry, published in 1934, provides a detailed account of the activities of a squadron of the Royal Flying Corps (later Royal Air Force) on the Western Front. Although it is a work of fiction, it is based largely on the author’s own experience as a pilot. The central character, Tom Cundall, is one of the few pilots to survive the months of combat described in the novel; not only are many planes shot down but many crash due to mechanical faults or pilot inexpertise.

The author, Victor Yeates (born 30 September 1897), grew up in suburban London and attended the same school as another author, Henry Williamson, a close friend. He entered the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps in 1916. Serving as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps from May 1917, after training he was posted to 46 Squadron in February 1918. Like the central character of the novel, Yeates flew Sopwith Camels. He had 248 flying hours on the Western Front. He died in 1934 of tuberculosis understood to be brought on by war fatigue. In the novel, one of his friends in the squadron (Miller) is invalided home suffering from tuberculosis resulting from the influenza epidemic. The prognosis for Miller was cautiously optimistic:
“The colonel says I'll need six months’ or a year’s rest and then I'll be all right as long as I take care of myself.” Many, however, like Yeates, never recovered.

The central character, Tom Cundall, does not usually see himself as a hero even though he is a successful pilot. He often expresses a lack of desire to kill the enemy and a sense of remorse when he does so. On the other hand, he feels some wry satisfaction twice when unreasonable superior officers are killed in action:
“There was no escaping the fact that he was glad, profoundly glad, that Yorke had gone. He was a swine to be glad but there it was. It was the old Beal business over again; though without the racking element of hero worship. Then he remembered what Williamson had said on that occasion: that it wasn't Beal’s death but his removal that he had been glad of. And that was true.”

Towards the end of the novel he is plagued by depression, alcoholism and nightmares, each brought on by the trauma of combat and the fatigue of war:
“He felt as if broken glass was in his blood-stream. The darkness was terrible with visions of Fokkers in formations towering to terrible heights over the Somme and Chaulnes. He flew infinite dream-distances over nightmare battlefields; telling himself all the while that this was merely the early morning ebb of vitality. But the knowledge did not help him; his blood carried the broken glass into his brain; he lay impotent against the forces of night. He must endure. Death seemed waiting in the darkness. He must endure. He dozed and dreamed that he was wandering and searching, always wandering and searching.”

Earth's Quality

This novel, published in 1935, is set in Laverock, a New South Wales farm on which three generations of the Weldon family live. The patriarch, John Weldon, persists in determining how the farm will be run and preserves the agricultural methods of his generation. He negotiates to hand over control of the farm to Alec, son of Charles, the only one of his sons to survive the war. Charles is a poet and is somewhat estranged from his family but his son is more grounded and has studied in agricultural college ahead of coming to his grandfather's farm. The other main characters of the novel are James Fraser and Tinonee, his daughter. Fraser had been an unsuccessful tenant at Laverock when Tinonee was a child. She returns in her early twenties on a nostalgic road trip having begun to assert herself as an enterprising businesswoman and attracts the admiration of both Charles and Alec.

The author, Winifred Birkett (born 28 August 1897), was born into a family of writers, musicians and artists. She began her literary career with the publication of a collection of poetry in 1932. Her first novel was published in the following year. This novel, her second, was well received and was awarded the prestigious Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

This novel is significant in its depiction of a family that is almost obliterated by the war. In the first chapter, John Weldon complains that “[the] house sounds very empty” and reminds his servant, Anthony, that he had four sons:
“The little privileged Cockney man-of-all-work knew all about those sons. He had been batman in turn to two of them in France, had buried Warren there with his own hands and afterwards spent two years vainly seeking to hear the end of John. Leslie, whom he could not follow to Palestine, had died, they told him, five miles from Jerusalem... The place had sounded inexpressibly empty to him since the day he had come back to it alone.”
The other family central to the novel had also suffered from the impact of the war. James Fraser is described as having been “broken by war”. As a tenant of the Weldons, he was “a dispirited man from the beginning” and, having left there, he drifted from unsuccessful project to unsuccessful project. Charles Weldon remembers him as “a war-wreck” but another of the Weldons recalled that Fraser had been recommended for the Victoria Cross in 1917, suggesting that he was strong and courageous before his breakdown.
The novel, however, is ultimately a romance and expresses confidence in the ability of the next generation to keep the name going. John Weldon is determined to die happy in the knowledge that the war had not been able to destroy all that he had lived for.