Scars Upon My Heart is an anthology of poetry written by American and British women during the First World War, compiled and edited by Catherine W. Reilly and published by Virago Press in 1981.

[6] In the introduction to Scars Upon My Heart, she writes that the bibliography motivated her to create the anthology; she was curious 'as to why the work of most of the 532 women poets traced in my bibliographical study should have apparently faded into oblivion'.

[1] The aims of the press were well-suited for Scars Upon My Heart Stacy Gillis argues: 'The numerous poetry anthologies published both during the war and through to the late 1970s were unanimous in their sustained championing of a fairly small group of male poets, a brotherhood of "Those who were there" on the Western Front'.

[8] In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist literary critics sought out women writers from earlier eras and were instrumental in raising questions about 'traditions of poetic value' that restricted what works would be studied.

[11] Scars Upon My Heart includes 125 poems written by 79 women, bringing together works by writers with established reputations, such as Edith Sitwell, May Wedderburn Cannan, Margaret Postgate Cole, Sara Teasdale, and Katharine Tynan.

In a negative review in The Observer, Lorna Sage reviled 'the amateurishness of many of the writers': 'There are, too, many "poems" in the proper sense—about personal loss, about England as a garden (described again and again, with pitiful irony) where everything grows but love'.

[18] Montefiore echoes a common point raised among feminist literary critics, that 'the definition of war poetry privileges actual battlefront experience'.

Although the poems vary in skill and form, they convey a moving and sometimes eloquent account of women's lives as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, munition workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, and pacifist and militant suffragists.

The war influenced every aspect of women's lives; and the themes of guilt, despair, protest, grief, lament, and reconciliation to a bitter and sometimes even shameful survival constitute the narrative of the anthology as a whole.