Mary Russell's War: A Journal of the Great War

Mary Russell’s War

On the day the Great War began, August 4, 1914, fourteen year-old Mary Russell opened a new diary and wrote the words:

I was fourteen when I first heard about the War. Fourteen years and 214 days, with my nose (as usual) in a book as I walked down the stairs. At least, that’s how Mother says I shall remember it. And Father agrees, that War will be both long and hard, for all the European countries and the Empire...

A hundred years later, Laurie R. King, Miss Russell’s literary agent, began to publish the account of this youthful writer in her own blog. (King is credited with having written the Russell memoirs, just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was credited for being the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories penned by Dr Watson.)
Young Miss Russell’s weekly entries begin in San Francisco and take her to Boston, London, and Sussex during the early months of War. They serve as a chronicle not only of the European conflict, but of her own catastrophic turmoil. Since the first of Miss Russell's “memoirs” was published in 1994 (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, whose opening the above words echo) readers around the world have come to know, and wonder at, the exploits of this young woman. “Mary Russell’s War” offers these readers a unique and personal glimpse into her beginnings, before she met, and had her life transformed by, Mr Sherlock Holmes.