Much ink has been spilled about the writers and artists that supported the Spanish Civil War, both in their art and on the battlefield. However, in the telling, the story ended up being mostly about the men who served. This book provides a much-needed corrective to that lopsided history. Watling digs deep to find the unsung heroines of an overlooked (at least in the U.S.) conflict that prefigured the strife of the Second World War. Some of the names—​author Nancy Cunard, for one—will be familiar, while others (like Salaria Kea, a nurse from Harlem) were previously lost to history and are now resurrected by Watling's skilled and sympathetic hand. Watling uses interviews with veterans and other witnesses, as well as the womens' own writing, to recreate a time and place that seems distant, but is actually not so different from our own. There is a lovely subtext yoking the womens' yearning for personal freedom, to love and live as they wish, to the desire to live free from the threat of authoritarian fascism. Indispensable for readers with an interest in the intersection of art, literature, gender/sexuality and international politics in the early 20th century.

I had a hard time following and knowing who's perspective I was reading. I couldn't get into the book very quickly and I have a long TBR list.
I was unable to finish reading this book.

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future shines a light on the women and others who came from America and the UK to participate in the Spanish Civil War (Abraham Lincoln Brigades). This book is a great companion piece to the Adam Hochschild book "Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Civil War 1936-1939" which I read in the past few years. Hochschild's book lays the foundation of what was led up to Franco coming into power and how people like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway played roles in this fight against fascism. What I like about Watling's book is she brings a feminist perspective by shining a spotlight on women artists (writers, photographers, journalists, etc.) who did incredible acts of bravery and have not been recognized or given credit due to being overshadowed by famous men such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa. I also learned about Langston Hughes' contribution to the resistance which I had not known about. This was a great read and helps fill in the gaps of the history of resistance during the Franco regime.

Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an ARC and I left this review voluntarily.

This book took me a lot longer to read than I anticipated. The focus here is on British and American women who volunteered for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War has been called the dress rehearsal for WWII. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy supported Franco's Nationalists. If you are looking for more information involving the Spanish, this is not the book for you. it's also not one for you if you're looking for anything but the most basic info about the Spanish experience.

The author is obviously very emotionally invested in her topic. She calls all of the women by their first names and uses a tone like they are old friends. In this she gives secondhand accounts about larger topics and hints to a larger picture. But mostly it seems like she's interested in.this one group of famous people, and this is her loooong list of namedropping and gossip.

The positive here is that I learned about the intersections of the lives or gossip of these revered famous people.. This makes me unsure I also learned of quite a few new people. There just could have been a much better execution with more of.the subjects and less of the author.

Tomorrow Perhaps The Future
Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy

Taking Sides:
As the subtitle suggests, this vivid, fascinating but sprawling group biography has at least two overlapping books in it: one on British and American women writers and the Spanish Civil War, and another, on “outsiders,” beyond these women, including a few male writers as well as racial and political minorities from Europe and America.

The book traces the trajectories of 12 people as they confront and try to fight fascism through the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. All had the option not to be involved, but felt compelled to witness and try to affect history. British writers include Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend-Warner, Virginia Woolf, and Jessica Mitford. From America, the author follows Martha Gellhorn and Josephine Herbst. Also from America is poet Langston Hughes and nurse Salaria Kea, (both African American), as well as journalist Virginia Cowles. Finally, there are George and Nan Green, British communists, and Gerda Taro, the young, Hungarian-born photographer.

Too Many Sides
The number of actors dilutes the impact of this powerful book, and some of the choices are questionable: For example, Salaria Kea and the Greens are participants, but not writers. Langston Hughes is an outsider but of a very different kind than the essentially middle- and upper-class women around whom the book rotates. A focus on the women writers alone would have concentrated the narrative, and still have communicated the formidable issues the author so thoughtfully presents.

The Power and Privilege of Outsiders
Chief among these issues is the role of the self-described “outsider” and the imperative to take sides in pressing situations. Watling quotes* some of these women, asking, “When does tolerance become apathy?” “What is the line between solidarity and appropriation?” She describes the tension between types of looking and reporting: What is accuracy and objectivity; when is writing acknowledgement and when does it become voyeurism?
She asks pressing questions about the purpose and privilege of writers, and how they understand their role in history, “shaping it as it happens,” as Martha Gellhorn says.

Of perhaps most interest to me was her theme of the need to take sides: “There are not always two sides to a story.” Put into political and historical context, in the 1930’s the non-intervention of major countries left Spain – and later the world – vulnerable to fascism’s fury.

Watling’s passionate portrayal of complicated, flawed people, trying to use their abilities and skills to make the world safer and fairer, is moving and thought-provoking as we look at today’s issues. Its over-inclusiveness detracts from, but does not damage, the powerful points she makes.

*The advanced reader’s copy in Kindle gives only locations, rather than pages, so I cannot direct you to the quotes themselves.

Note to Publisher: Watling mentions the importance of "images and texts," but does not include many. I am aware of work being done by Dr. Laura Hartmann-Villalta, of Johns Hopkins University, who is working on a manuscript focusing on women writers and artists in the Spanish Civil War. Please contact me if you would like her contact information.

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future has an ambitious goal, trying to show how a variety of different women experienced the Spanish Civil War. In trying to do this, it tries to do too much, making much of the book hard to follow, jumping from person to person, jumping back and forth in time trying to provide background on all the people, and also incorporating a first person perspective of the author as she wrote about the research she was doing. This often changed paragraph to paragraph, jumping me from Gerda Taro on the frontlines, to Nancy Cunard and her fascination with Black people, to Virginia Woolf, to Salaria Kea and the discrimination she faced. So many people from Europe and the United States poured into Spain when the war started to support the Republic. And some truly did support it, risking their lives for the cause. After reading this however, it feels like there were a lot of people that showed up to be war tourists, or at the very least engaged in a minimal amount of danger to be a voice of war causes. I didn’t feel like I got a consistent timeline of events from when the war broke out until the Republic fell. And with as much as many of the people in this book seemed to wander in and out of the country as visas permitted, I never felt like I got to see fully the atrocities that happened, just glimpses as someone happened to be somewhere something eventful happened. Not every person in the book survived the war, but it convinces me that what I would really like to see is a book about Salaria Kea’s time serving as a nurse of color. Or how Martha Gellhorn’s experience reporting on this war impacted the rest of her writing career. This book is just too much of a grab bag of information to be as impactful and informative as I would like. A complimentary copy of this book was provided by the publisher. All thoughts and opinions are my own.