|
 British
pacifist, feminist, poet, and novelist, whose novels are largely
autobiographical. Her best-known work is TESTAMENT OF YOUTH (1933).
Vera Brittain was born at Newcastle under Lyme, Straffordshire,
the daughter of a wealthy paper manufacturer, Thomas Brittain, and
the former Edith Bervan. She was educated at St Monica's School,
and, despite parental opposition, also at Somerville College, Oxford.
During World War I Brittain left Somerville temporarily and served
as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. Her fiancé, Roland Leighton,
was killed in action during the war. Her experiences turned Brittain
into a convicted pacifist, who became an active member of various
peace movements in both England and the United States.
After the war she worked as a teacher in Oxford and in 1922 moved
to London, devoting herself to writing. Between 1921 and 1925 Brittain
travelled extensively throughout Europe. Her journeys included visits
to the Rhineland, the Ruhr, and Cologne during the post-war occupation
of Germany.
In 1925 Brittain married the political scientist George C.G.Catlin
(1896-1979), who was later appointed professor of politics at Cornell
University and knighted in 1970. Soon after their marriage they
went to the United States and lived for a year in Ithaca, New York.
 While
George Caitlin spent a great amount time in the United States, working
at Cornell, Brittain remained in England. She developed a close
friendship with the novelist and an ardent feminist Winifred Holtby
(1898-1935), whom she had met in Oxford. Holtby had also served
during World War I in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. They settled
in 1922 in a flat in London as aspiring writers. Holtby's novel
Anderby Wold appeared in 1923. Her last novel, South Riding
(1936), is set in Yorkshire, and tells the story of enterprising
headmistress Sarah Burton.
In 1923 Brittain published her first novel, THE DARK TIDE, an account
of life in Oxford, and the sexism she encountered their, in her
early struggles as a woman to achieve an education. It provoked
a storm of protests. Influenced by the South African writer Olive
Schreiner (1855-1920), her wartime experiences and marriage to George
Caitlin are recounted in Testament of Youth. The book was
an immediate bestseller and has gained status as an important feminist
text.
Brittain joined the Peace Pledge Union of Canon Dick Sheppard,
and fought for peace during World War II, attacking, in SEED OF
CHAOS (1944), the saturation bombing of Germany. The book encountered
great hostility both in Britain and America.
Although Brittain wrote several volumes of poetry and fiction,
she is principally remembered for Testament of Friendship
(1940), a memorial to Winifred Holtby, and TESTAMENT OF EXPERIENCE
(1957), a companion to the early autobiography, which covers the
years 1925-50. Her other books include BORN 1925, a family saga
dealing with the responses of two generations to World War II, LADY
INTO WOMAN: A HISTORY OF WOMEN FROM VICTORIA TO ELISABETH II (1953),
RADCLYFFE HALL: A CASE OF OBSCENITY? (1968), which defends Hall's
lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Brittain's diaries
written between 1913 and 1917 have been published under the title
CHRONICLE OF YOUTH (1981).
Vera Brittain was a Honorary Life President of the Society of Women
Writers and Journalists, a vice-president of the National Peace
Council, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She died
in London on March 29, 1970. Her daughter, Shirley Williams, was
a prominent Labour Party politician cabinet minister in the 1960.
She co-founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and was its president
from1982-88.
For further reading: On Second Thought by J. Gray (1946);
The Vera Brittain Archive in McMaster University Library by T.
Smart et al. (1977); Feminist Theorists by M. Mellown (1983);
Vera Brittain by G. Handley-Taylor and J.M. Dockeray (1983); Between
Ourselves, ed. by K. Payne (1984); Family Quartet by J. Catlin
(1987); Vera Brittain. The Story of the Woman Who Wrote Testament
of Youth by H. Bailey (1987); Eva Brittain and Winifred Holtby
by J.E. Kenard (1989).
|
