(1893-1973)
World War I poet and memoirist. May Wedder-burn Cannan was the second daughter of Charles Cannan, dean of Trinity College, Oxford, and his wife Mary, nee Wedderburn. During the war, May Cannan was a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment and worked at the Clarendon Press, which produced pamphlets and books for the government’s propaganda bureau. The four weeks she spent in France as a canteen worker form the basis of one of her finest poems, "Rouen." Her first volume of poetry, In War Time, was published in 1917. She was working for British Intelligence, MI5, in Paris when the armistice was declared. May Cannan was engaged to her childhood friend, Major Bevil Quiller-Couch, son of Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), professor of English literature at Cambridge. Their happiness was shortlived, for although Bevil survived the war, he died in the influenza epidemic in 1919. Can-nan’s grief inspired some of the most poignant poems of the war, including "When the Vision Dies." She published two more collections, The Splendid Days (1919) and The House of Hope (1923). The Lonely Generation, her fictionalized memoir, appeared in 1934. She died in 1973.
Unlike Vera Brittain, May Cannan did not ascribe to the idea that World War I was a futile waste of a generation. Her posthumously published autobiography, Grey Ghosts and Voices (1976) is an evocative portrait of her Oxford childhood and a moving account of her experience of war and its aftermath.
