author
Barbara McLaren
1887–1973
Best known for Women of the War (1917), this British writer captured how women served, organized, and endured during World War I. Her work blends eyewitness feeling with a clear sense of the scale of wartime effort.
1 Audiobook
Women of the war
by Barbara McLaren
About the author
Born Barbara Jekyll in 1887, she was later known as Barbara McLaren during her first marriage and is also recorded as Barbara Freyberg, Baroness Freyberg. For readers, the name Barbara McLaren is most closely tied to Women of the War, published in 1917.
That book looks at the many ways women contributed during World War I, including nursing, relief work, and other forms of service. It appeared while the war was still being fought, which gives it an immediacy that helps modern readers feel how urgent and personal those efforts were.
Later in life she became Baroness Freyberg and lived until 1973. Even with a relatively small body of work readily linked to her name, Women of the War remains a valuable period piece: a direct, readable window into how one contemporary writer understood women's place in a world transformed by war.