Louise Morrish looks at two courageous women who defied the authorities and went on the warpath during the First World War: one, literally, as a soldier, and one as a doctor. Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dorothy Lawrence inspired her new book, Women of War.
In 1914, a surgeon and a soldier went to war — one boldly, one clandestinely.
Both were female.
Both sparked change for women today.
I write novels inspired by ordinary women in the past who achieved extraordinary things, but whom history has forgotten. When I discovered the true but largely forgotten stories of Doctor Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dorothy Lawrence, I knew I had to bring their incredible achievements back into the light.
My new novel Women of War, and its sequel, The Library of War and Peace, are both based on Louisa and Dorothy’s courageous adventures, at a time when women were expected to stay safe at home.
Louisa (1873–1943) was a surgeon, suffragette, and social reformer. She was also the daughter of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Louisa qualified as a Doctor of Medicine in 1900.
But because of the continuing opposing attitudes to women in the medical profession, her only option was to join the New Hospital for Women, a female-only-run institution originally founded by her mother. Here, Louisa treated women and children, working with her colleague and life partner Dr Flora Murray, until August, 1914, when the First World War broke out.
In response, the British Expeditionary Force was rallied across the Channel, military hospitals were established, and medical staff were recruited. Louisa and Flora set up the Women’s Hospital Corps (WHC), with their own staff of women, and offered their surgical expertise to the War Office.
But they were rejected on the basis of being female.
Undeterred, they then approached the French Red Cross, who snapped them up. The WHC was deployed to a newly built hotel, the Claridge, in Paris, and within weeks Louisa and Flora had established an all-female run auxiliary hospital. The hotel’s chandelier-lit, marble-floored salons were turned into wards, the ladies cloakroom was transformed into a bright, clean operating theatre, and the bedrooms became dispensaries, storerooms, pathology labs, and an X-ray darkroom.
They began treating casualties brought straight from the front, soldiers whose injuries were more horrendous than any of the medics could have envisioned. In the opening months of the First World War, shockingly huge numbers of injured soldiers sought medical treatment, and casualties on all fronts during 1914 topped five million, with a million men killed.
The scale of violence and the extent of injury was unprecedented. This was due to a lethal combination of mass armies and modern weaponry, including new weapons such as machine guns, shells and later in the war, poison gas.
Louisa and her team of female doctors, nurses and orderlies battled night and day to save lives. And though the struggle was relentless, they maintained hope, until the German Army threatened to break through into Paris. Louisa and her team were faced with an impossible decision – should they stay in Paris and risk attack, or relocate the hospital to somewhere safer?
At around the same time as Louisa was wrestling with this dilemma, a young woman from England had arrived in France. Dorothy Lawrence was a poor orphan with big dreams. She longed to be a journalist, but that career path was closed to girls like her. Dauntless, she decided to attempt a stunt.
If she could get to the front and be the first female war correspondent to report from the battlefields, she had a chance of making her name. She later wrote in her memoir: “I’ll see what an ordinary English girl, without credentials or money, can accomplish.”
So she cycled to Paris, where she befriended two British Army soldiers, and borrowed their spare khaki uniform. She bound her chest, cut her hair short, darkened her complexion with Condy’s Fluid and shoe polish, and enlisted in the army. For ten days, Dorothy worked alongside soldiers digging trenches, under enemy fire. She wrote her unofficial reports, and all was going well, until she was injured.
Taken to an aid post, her true identity was discovered and she was arrested on suspicion of being a spy.
In real life, Dorothy’s luck ran out at this point, but in my storyline her character encounters a pioneering female doctor, and as a result the course of both women’s lives are changed for ever.
Some might say that Louisa and Dorothy’s exploits were highly unusual, in such a patriarchal world. But the more I immerse myself in women’s history, the more stories like theirs I’m discovering.
Ordinary women in the past, who achieved extraordinary things, are not quite as uncommon as we might think.
May their inspiration live on.
Women of War by Louise Morrish is published on 27 March, 2025.
See more about this book.
Louise is a historical fiction author and librarian from Hampshire. She writes stories inspired by the lives of women in the past, who achieved extraordinary things, but whom history has forgotten.
Her debut novel, Operation Moonlight, won the Penguin Random House First Novel competition and was published in 2022. She is Writer in Residence at Goldfinch Books, where she runs a writing group and creative writing classes for beginner writers.
louisemorrish.com
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Louise has also written Extreme research: how far should a writer go? about researching her first novel.
Here are some related Historia features you might enjoy reading:
The hidden stories of the First World War by Lucy Steeds, about women nursing during WWI
The Guinea Pig Club – a WWII RAF pilot elite by LP Fergusson, about serious injuries in WWII
Licensed brothels in France during the First World War by Alec Marsh
The General Who Wept by Chris Moore
Paris, 1919: a fragile peace by Flora Johnston
The long legacy of the First World War by Alan Bardos
The window-smashing suffragettes of 1912 by Jennifer Godfrey
Images:
- Louisa Garrett Anderson by Francis Dodd, 1921: ©Royal Free Hospital via Art UK (fair use)
- Miss Flora Murray (left) and Dr. Louise Garrett Anderson (right) leaving Buckingham Palace after receiving decorations from The Times History and Encyclopaedia of the war, 1921: Wellcome Images via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
- British women surgeons at Hotel Claridge, Paris; the Surgeon-in-Charge is Dr Flora Murray (seated), October 1914: IWM (Q 107325) (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Dorothy Lawrence as a soldier, 1915: Wikimedia (public domain)
