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Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittain (29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, England, Vera Brittain was the daughter of a well-to-do paper manufacturer, (Thomas) Arthur Brittain (1864–1935) and his wife, Edith Mary (Bervon) Brittain (1868–1948). Her father was a director of family-owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton. Her mother was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, the daughter of an impoverished musician, John Inglis Bervon.
When Brittain was 18 months old, her family moved to Macclesfield, Cheshire, and 10 years later, in 1905, they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire. As Brittain was growing up, her only sibling, her brother, Edward, nearly two years her junior, was her closest companion. From the age of 13, she attended boarding-school at St Monica's, Kingswood, Surrey, where her mother's sister, Aunt Florence (Miss Bervon), was co-principal with Louise Heath-Jones, who had attended Newnham College, Cambridge.
After two years as a "provincial debutante", Brittain overcame her father's objections and went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1914 to read English Literature, taught by Hilda Lorimer and others. By this time, war had broken out and Brittain had become close to Roland Leighton, one of her brother's friends from Uppingham School. Finding her Oxford studies increasingly an irrelevance as her male contemporaries volunteered for war, Brittain delayed her degree after one year in the summer of 1915 to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse for much of the First World War. She served initially at the Devonshire Hospital in Buxton, and later in London, Malta and in France. While she was stationed close to the front at Etaples, her experience nursing German prisoners of war significantly influenced her journey towards internationalism and pacifism.
Roland Leighton, who became her fiancé in August 1915, close friends Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow, and finally her brother, Edward, were all killed in the war. Many of their letters to each other are reproduced in the book Letters from a Lost Generation. In one letter, Leighton speaks for his generation of public-school volunteers when he writes that he feels the need to play an "active part" in the war.
Returning to Oxford in 1919 to read history, Brittain found it difficult as "a war survivor" to adjust to life in postwar society. She met Winifred Holtby at Somerville, and a close friendship developed. They both aspired to become established on the London literary scene, and shared various London flats after coming down from Oxford. Eventually Holtby would become part of the Brittain-Catlin household after Brittain's marriage. The bond lasted until Holtby's death from renal failure due to glomerulonephritis in 1935. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville included Dorothy L. Sayers, Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy and Sylvia Thompson.
In 1925, Brittain married George Catlin, a political scientist (1896–1979). Their son, John Brittain-Catlin (1927–1987), whose relationship with his mother steadily deteriorated as he got older, was an artist, painter, businessman and the author of the posthumously published autobiography Family Quartet, which appeared in 1987. Their daughter, born 1930, was the former Labour Cabinet Minister, later Liberal Democrat peer, Shirley Williams (1930–2021), one of the "Gang of Four" rebels on the Social Democratic wing of the Labour Party who founded the SDP in 1981. Like Brittain, George Catlin was raised Anglican, as his father was an Anglican clergyman, but unlike her, Catlin had converted to the Catholic Church.
Brittain's first published novel, The Dark Tide (1923), created scandal as it caricatured dons at Oxford, especially at Somerville. In 1933, she published the work for which she became famous, Testament of Youth, followed in 1940 by Testament of Friendship— her tribute to and biography of Winifred Holtby —and Testament of Experience (1957), the continuation of her own story, which spanned the years between 1925 and 1950. Brittain based many of her novels on actual experiences and actual people. In this regard, her novel Honourable Estate (1936) was autobiographical, dealing with her failed friendship with the novelist Phyllis Bentley, her romantic feelings for her American publisher George Brett Jr, and her brother Edward's death in action on the Italian Front in 1918. Brittain's diaries from 1913 to 1917 were published in 1981 as Chronicle of Youth. Some critics have argued that Testament of Youth often differs markedly from Brittain's writings during the war, especially in respect of her attitudes towards the war, which were more conventional in 1914–18.
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Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittain (29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, England, Vera Brittain was the daughter of a well-to-do paper manufacturer, (Thomas) Arthur Brittain (1864–1935) and his wife, Edith Mary (Bervon) Brittain (1868–1948). Her father was a director of family-owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton. Her mother was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, the daughter of an impoverished musician, John Inglis Bervon.
When Brittain was 18 months old, her family moved to Macclesfield, Cheshire, and 10 years later, in 1905, they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire. As Brittain was growing up, her only sibling, her brother, Edward, nearly two years her junior, was her closest companion. From the age of 13, she attended boarding-school at St Monica's, Kingswood, Surrey, where her mother's sister, Aunt Florence (Miss Bervon), was co-principal with Louise Heath-Jones, who had attended Newnham College, Cambridge.
After two years as a "provincial debutante", Brittain overcame her father's objections and went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1914 to read English Literature, taught by Hilda Lorimer and others. By this time, war had broken out and Brittain had become close to Roland Leighton, one of her brother's friends from Uppingham School. Finding her Oxford studies increasingly an irrelevance as her male contemporaries volunteered for war, Brittain delayed her degree after one year in the summer of 1915 to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse for much of the First World War. She served initially at the Devonshire Hospital in Buxton, and later in London, Malta and in France. While she was stationed close to the front at Etaples, her experience nursing German prisoners of war significantly influenced her journey towards internationalism and pacifism.
Roland Leighton, who became her fiancé in August 1915, close friends Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow, and finally her brother, Edward, were all killed in the war. Many of their letters to each other are reproduced in the book Letters from a Lost Generation. In one letter, Leighton speaks for his generation of public-school volunteers when he writes that he feels the need to play an "active part" in the war.
Returning to Oxford in 1919 to read history, Brittain found it difficult as "a war survivor" to adjust to life in postwar society. She met Winifred Holtby at Somerville, and a close friendship developed. They both aspired to become established on the London literary scene, and shared various London flats after coming down from Oxford. Eventually Holtby would become part of the Brittain-Catlin household after Brittain's marriage. The bond lasted until Holtby's death from renal failure due to glomerulonephritis in 1935. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville included Dorothy L. Sayers, Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy and Sylvia Thompson.
In 1925, Brittain married George Catlin, a political scientist (1896–1979). Their son, John Brittain-Catlin (1927–1987), whose relationship with his mother steadily deteriorated as he got older, was an artist, painter, businessman and the author of the posthumously published autobiography Family Quartet, which appeared in 1987. Their daughter, born 1930, was the former Labour Cabinet Minister, later Liberal Democrat peer, Shirley Williams (1930–2021), one of the "Gang of Four" rebels on the Social Democratic wing of the Labour Party who founded the SDP in 1981. Like Brittain, George Catlin was raised Anglican, as his father was an Anglican clergyman, but unlike her, Catlin had converted to the Catholic Church.
Brittain's first published novel, The Dark Tide (1923), created scandal as it caricatured dons at Oxford, especially at Somerville. In 1933, she published the work for which she became famous, Testament of Youth, followed in 1940 by Testament of Friendship— her tribute to and biography of Winifred Holtby —and Testament of Experience (1957), the continuation of her own story, which spanned the years between 1925 and 1950. Brittain based many of her novels on actual experiences and actual people. In this regard, her novel Honourable Estate (1936) was autobiographical, dealing with her failed friendship with the novelist Phyllis Bentley, her romantic feelings for her American publisher George Brett Jr, and her brother Edward's death in action on the Italian Front in 1918. Brittain's diaries from 1913 to 1917 were published in 1981 as Chronicle of Youth. Some critics have argued that Testament of Youth often differs markedly from Brittain's writings during the war, especially in respect of her attitudes towards the war, which were more conventional in 1914–18.