Caroline Playne

Caroline Elizabeth Playne (1857–1948) was an English pacifist and historian.[1] Playne's 1925 book The Neuroses of the Nations used Freudian psychology to put forward a critique of warfare. [2]

Caroline Playne approached the pacifist militancy first towards 1904, when she became a founding member of Britain's National Peace Council, created to support the action of the international court in The Hague. [3] In 1908 she took part in the International Congress for Peace in London, and on this occasion she met the Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner, of whom years later she wrote a biography.[3] At the outbreak of the First World War, of which she had long feared, Playne engaged in relief activities of internees and prisoners of war, she continued as she could the pacifist militancy, and collected a large amount of materials and observations on the description of the psychological context of English society during the war.[3] After the war she wrote her observations in five volumes in which there is the still embryonic attempt to give life to a psychological and anthropological theory of war, and there are innumerable observations of great acuteness on the English social life before and during the war, thanks to which Playne's work conserves at least a considerable document value.

Playne was a friend of the writer Vernon Lee, who encouraged Playne to write her studies of the war.[4]

Bibliography
  • Playne, Caroline, The Neuroses of the Nations, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1925
  • Playne, Caroline, The Pre-War Mind in Britain. An Historical Review, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1928
  • Playne, Caroline, Society at War 1914—1916, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1931
  • Playne, Caroline, Britain Holds On 1917, 1918, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1933
  • Playne, Caroline, Bertha von Suttner, and the Struggle to Avert the World War, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1936

The four volumes on the Great War are also available in electronic edition, in a single ebook that collects them all:

  • Playne, Caroline, Society in the First World War, GogLiB ebooks, 2018
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References
  1. Sybil Oldfield (2004), "'Playne, Caroline Elizabeth (1857–1948)'", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/38530
  2. Charles Chatfield and R.M. Ili︠u︡khina, Peace/mir : An Anthology of Historic Alternatives to War. Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press, 1994. ISBN 0815626010 (pp. 230-2, 238-40)
  3. Richard Espley (2016) "Caroline Playne: The Activities and Absences of a Campaigning Author in First World War London", The London Journal, 41:3, 249-265, DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2016.1216692
  4. Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain : from stage to Cold War.Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN 0199239681 (pg. 116-117)
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