That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

About the book

Franky Sherbrand and Margot Mountjohn marry in January 1914, surrounded by fashionable pleasures and assumptions about the life ahead of them. Their differences soon complicate the apparently perfect match, while the larger social circle introduces ambitions that extend beyond drawing rooms and private happiness. Military aviation gives technological change a visible presence, and the German flier von Herrnung belongs to a world where charm and national rivalry can coexist at the same dinner table. Richard Dehan expands the domestic opening into a wartime narrative of divided attachments, secret activity, and service. Published during the conflict, the book carries emphatic British patriotic judgments and hostile representations of the enemy. Its movement from frivolity toward emergency makes the prewar social order appear both attractive and dangerously unprepared.

• Private life and war
• Aviation and modernity
• Patriotism and social responsibility

Why read it

The early marriage and society scenes acquire a different significance as military technology and approaching war enter the same world.

English S. B. Gundy edition with the 1918 Putnam copyright