Letters from the Little Blue Room

A 'lost' women's classic from World War I. A Scottish woman sends funny, moving, compassionate and rousing letters to her younger brother, set to fight with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the trenches of WWI. Dunfermline, her hometown and the base for the Scottish regiment The Black Watch, morphs into an active home front. Letter by letter we watch the war unfolding. Her brother trains with his cavalry regiment on Englands Salisbury Plain and moves to frontline duty in France. Shocked by the war and those who inflame it, the sisters letters are frank and also encouraging. Others are vanishing. She needs her brother, her young Canadian, to survive. Daisy Thomson Gigg creates a voice as alive and open, fresh and engaged as when she sat at the little round table, beneath the red-shaded lamp more than a century ago, writing to her Boy, determined to keep his spirits up and remind him of home. Her Scottish identity resonates in every sentence, her political idealism, compassion and love shine out even on her darkest days. Hers represents a new and unique voice and an important addition to the canon of literature of the First World War. Angela K. Smith, author of Women's Writing of the First World War