Agricultural History Review, Volume 71 Part 1 (2023), pp. 87–107

This article acts as a recuperation of the little-known agricultural writings of E. M. Barraud, who in 1939 took up work on a Cambridgeshire farm as a member of the Women’s Land Army and recorded her experiences of over five years on the land in two memoirs: Set my hand upon the plough (1946) and Tail corn (1948). Barraud was a gifted writer, and the books offer a glimpse of what it meant to beat ‘[her] typewriter into a ploughshare for the duration’. They record the hardships and rewards of agricultural life as well as its unexpected friendships. But her writing has further social and environmental signif-icance. She explored the positive implications of wartime land work for women while also criticizing working conditions in the Land Army. Meanwhile, she noted the ecological impacts of changing farming practices, especially on farmland birds. Her story also contributes to the growing field of queer rural history. Barraud lived with a female partner and was known to friends as ‘John’. Later in her career she wrote scientific papers that demonstrate her fascination with non-binary behaviour in certain species. The article tentatively situates Barraud’s work within the georgic and nature writing genres, and argues that it merits further investigation from a range of disciplinary perspectives.