After surviving a severe case of influenza in 1918, Katherine Anne
Porter observed, 'It simply divided my life, cut across it.' The 1918
influenza pandemic spanned the volatile early twentieth century, a time
period that included the end of World War I and the granting of female
suffrage in the Western world. Focusing on major novels and essays by
Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Virginia Woolf, this work
examines how narratives by women writers engage the 1918 influenza
pandemic, emphasizing vision as compensation for losses of both war and
disease. Drawing on World War I posters, poetry, songs, drawings, and
photographs, the argument offers a persuasive framework for connecting
war, disease, and gender to the shock of the modern in twentieth-century
culture.