| Summary: | Northern housewife Nella Last and novelist and essayist Naomi Mitchison were from widely different social and cultural backgrounds but shared one common point: both kept wartime diaries for Mass-Observation from 1939 to 1945. This article, after briefly addressing the circumstances in which such different women came to be involved in the same project, examines the two published diaries in conjunction in order to shed light, first, on the effects of World War II on two British women from very different milieux, paying particular attention to what the two accounts reveal of the ways in which social class and gender intersect. Then, approaching the narrations in the light of the all-pervasive wartime themes of exile and alienation, we see emerge a very different reading of the experience of these two women as wives and mothers.
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