New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
Olivia Cockett was twenty-six years old in the summer of 1939 when she responded to an invitation from Mass Observation to “ordinary” individuals to keep a diary of their everyday lives, attitudes, feelings, and social relations. This book is an annotated, unabridged edition of her candid and evocative diary.
Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary 1939-1942 is rooted in the extraordinary milieu of wartime London. Vibrant and engaging, Olivia’s diary reveals her frustrations, fears, pleasures, and self-doubts. She records her mood swings and tries to understand them, and speaks of her lover (a married man) and the intense relationship they have. As she and her friends and family in New Scotland Yard are swept up by the momentous events of another European war, she vividly reports on what she sees and hears in her daily life.
Hers is a diary that brings together the personal and the public. It permits us to understand how one intelligent, imaginative woman struggled to make sense of her life, as the city in which she lived was drawn into the turmoil of a catastrophic war.
Contributor Notes
Robert Malcolmson taught in the History Department at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, between 1969 and 2004. Author of several books, he now lives in Coburg, Ontario, and works part-time as a personal counsellor.|Olivia Cockett was born in 1912 and grew up and lived in London. She started a diary in August 1939 and continued with it until October 1942, which has been published as Love & War in London: A Woman's Diary, 1939–1942.
Editorial Review
Olivia Cockett's detailed three-year diary written between August 1939 and October 1942 is unusual in its length, its literary quality, and its level of detail and openness.... [Her] writing is vibrant and engaging... She writes, as Malcolmson points out, not only of the facts, but of the feelings of wartime, revealing how public and private experiences were closely entangled.
— Amy Bell, University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada 2005, Volume 76, Number 1, Winter 2007, 2008 January
