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In 1939 the writer Enid Barraud, disillusioned with her city life, left London and went to live in a village in Cambridgeshire, joining what became known as The Women's Land Army, one of thousands of women who worked the land, while war raged overhead and abroad. In her recently rediscovered memoir, Set My Hand Upon The Plough, first published in 1946, Enid writes with remarkable candour and honesty about her life on the farm on the Home Front. Barraud preferred to identify as male, was known to the other farm workers as John, and lived with her female partner. The book now joins the ranks of important LGBT memoirs and casts new light on the lives of men and women who fought or worked for the liberation of Europe.
This new edition has an introduction by Luke Turner, author of Out of the Woods and Men at War.
E. M. Barraud (died 1972), was a writer and poet, who also wrote Tail Corn, a memoir of rural life. Her war years were marked by many contributions to Mass Observation. In later life she worked for the Zoology department at Cambridge University.
"It was the war which liberated Barraud from her life of clerical drudgery in the City and sent her to a rural England where, it appears, she made no compromise of her identity."
– Luke Turner
"[Barraud's] voice is authentic, as well it should be after her years of close contact with the land, its moods, its workers, the ups and downs, the trials, the moments of despair and the moments of pure pleasure."
– Vita Sackville-West, quoted in The Agricultural Writings of E. M. Barraud by Dr Pippa Marland in Agricultural History Review
