Eva Dobell

Eva was the daughter of Wine Merchant and local historian Clarence Mason Dobell from Cheltenham, and the niece of the Victorian poet Sydney Dobell. She volunteered to join the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) as a nurse in World War I. Her experiences in the VAD prompted her to write poetry about, inter alia, wounded and maimed soldiers which has been well-thought of by many versed in the ways of poetry. She also took part in the morale-boosting work of writing to prisoners of war.{{cite web |title=allpoetry |url=https://allpoetry.com/Eva-Dobell}} Her full name was Eveline Jessie Dobell and she was born the youngest of three children on 30 January 1876 at the Grove, Charlton Kings in Gloucestershire, England. She died on 3 September 1963 at the age of 87 years at which time her home address was Abbeyholme, Overton Rd, Cheltenham. She never married. Her mother was Emily Anne Duffield a native of Manchester, England.

While she was also known in her time as a regional poetEvidenced by her inclusion in S. Fowler Wright, ed. The County Series of Contemporary Poetry No. VII, an anthology of poems by poets from or near Gloucester. (one of her Gloucestershire poems was recently set to music"Tom's Long Post" on Johnny Coppin's The Gloucestershire Collection.), Dobell is best known today for her occasional poems from the war period, which all describe wounded soldiers, their experiences, and their bleak prospects.{{cite journal|last=Lusty|first=Heather|date=Summer 2008|title=Looking Back: New Studies in the Literature of Twentieth-Century War|url=|journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=31|issue=4|pages=145–51|doi=10.2979/jml.2008.31.4.145|id=|quote=Their elegiac poems, characterized by a sense of mourning, emphasized the suffering they witnessed in the injured, often with arresting candor|authorlink=|s2cid=162212216}} Lusty is speaking of "female medical persona like May Sinclair, Vera Brittain, Mary Henderson, and Eva Dobell, working in dressing stations and hospitals." A few of these poems are widely dispersed on the internet, and these continue to receive some scholarly acknowledgment. "Night Duty," for instance, is cited as one of many poems by female war-poets and nurses that provide access to an experience rarely shared by male poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.{{cite web

| last = Cummings

| first = Randy

| authorlink =

| title = Female Poets of the First World War: A Study in the Diversity for the Fifth Grade Social Studies Curriculum

|quote = Their intimate knowledge of suffering and death influenced women to write verse stripped of the sentimental and jingoistic.

| work = Poetry In and Out of the Classroom: Essays from the ACLS Elementary and Secondary Schools Teacher Curriculum Development Project

| publisher = American Council of Learned Societies: Occasional Paper No. 29

| year = 1995

| url = http://archives.acls.org/op/op29cummings.htm

| doi =

| accessdate = 2008-12-08}} A similar comment was made by John Oxenham in his foreword to Mary H. J. Henderson's 1918 collection, In War and Peace: Songs of a Scotswoman,{{Cite news|date=27 May 1918|title=POETRY - In War and Peace: Songs of a Scotswoman|work=The Scotsman}} some of which are based on her experiences in Serbia, with the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service, namely it is a 'vision of war seen from the inside, and finding expression through the woman-poet's mind'.{{Cite book|last=Khan|first=Nosheen|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/18051515|title=Women's poetry of the First World War|date=1988|publisher=University Press of Kentucky|isbn=0-8131-1677-5|location=Lexington, Ky.|pages=106|oclc=18051515}}

Perhaps the most frequently reproduced is "Pluck," especially on sites dedicated to the Great War.For instance, [http://www.fromthetrenches.co.uk/pdf/5.pdf "Pluck"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070310174952/http://www.fromthetrenches.co.uk/pdf/5.pdf |date=2007-03-10 }} on [http://www.fromthetrenches.co.uk From The Trenches] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070608174402/http://www.fromthetrenches.co.uk/ |date=2007-06-08 }}, and on [http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/out_p2.html First World War Poetry]. "Pluck" also found its way into printed anthologies such as The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War,Vincent Sherry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. {{ISBN|978-0-521-52897-9}}. and was even set to music.Seven Ages: An Anthology of Poetry with Music. Naxos Audio Books, 2000.

After the war, she continued to write; in all, she published half a dozen books of poetry, a verse drama, and edited a book of poems by Lady Margaret Sackville.

• "(In A Soldier's Hospital I) Pluck"
• "Advent 1916"
• "Night Duty"
• "(In A Soldiers' Hospital II) Gramophone Tunes"

{{Cite book

| last1 = Dowson

| first1 = Jane

| author-link =

| last2 = Entwistle

| first2 = Alice

| author2-link =

| title = A History of Twentieth-century British Women's Poetry

| place = Cambridge

| publisher = Cambridge UP

| year = 2005

| page = [https://archive.org/details/historyoftwentie0000dows/page/312 312]

| volume =

| edition =

| url = https://archive.org/details/historyoftwentie0000dows

| url-access = registration

| quote = eva dobell.

| doi =

| id =

| isbn = 978-0-521-81946-6

}}.

• Songs and Sonnets. London: Elkin Mathews, 1902.
• A Bunch of Cotswold Grasses. London: A.H. Stockwell, 1919.
• Snap-shots of Travel. London: Erskine Macdonald, 1925.
• Youths and the Swallows and Other Verse. London: Favil Press, 1942.
• A Gloucestershire Year. Bradford: Jongleur Press, 1949.
• Verses New and Old. London: Favil Press, 1959.

• A Woodland Tale: A Phantasy. London: George Allen and Sons, 1909.

• Margaret Sackville. A Poet's Return: Some Later Poems of Lady Margaret Sackville. Cheltenham: Burrow's Press, 1940.

• S. Fowler Wright, ed. The County Series of Contemporary Poetry No. VII. Gloucester: The Empire Poetry League, 1927.Table of contents at [http://www.sfw.org/books/cs7.html The County Series of Contemporary Poetry No. VII] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081013151424/http://www.sfw.org/books/cs7.html |date=2008-10-13 }}. "The Roman Camp" and "The Faery Wood."
• Catherine W. Reilly, ed. Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War. London: Virago Press, 1982.
• Vincent Sherry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. {{ISBN|978-0-521-52897-9}}. "Pluck."
• Johnny Coppin. The Gloucestershire Collection. Red Sky, 1994. "Tom's Long Post," set to music.

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Category:1876 births

Category:1963 deaths

Category:20th-century English poets

Category:English nurses

Category:British World War I poets

Category:British women in World War I

Category:Writers from Cheltenham

Category:Occasional poets