Vera Brittain: A Life (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vera Brittain: A Life Russell Gollard (bio) Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1995. 581 pp. Clothbound, £25.00 net in UK only. Vera Brittain (1893–1970) is of interest because of her literary output (29 published works including histories, novels, and poetry) and also because of her classic memoir of World War I, Testament of Youth, which traces her movement from jingoistic patriotism to pacifism and recounts the loss of her fiancé, brother, and virtually all her male friends in the carnage of the Western Front. Unlike most women of her generation, Brittain did not witness that carnage vicariously; she served as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), first in her home town of Buxton and later in France and Malta in the brutal conditions of military trauma-evacuation hospitals in the pre-antibiotic age. Vera Brittain: A Life is a full-length biography of this British feminist, pacifist writer whose stature will certainly be enhanced by this excellent work. Nowadays, most readers familiar with Brittain’s work were [End Page 266] introduced to it at university or through the infrequently repeated BBC dramatization of her Testament of Youth. The trajectory of Brittain’s fame reached its apex during the thirties, when she was a best-selling author as well as a sought-after and renowned lecturer both in England and the United States. She was also a famed pacifist (as opposed to isolationist)—not a popular position with the rise of dictatorships during the thirties. Berry and Bostridge in many ways follow the methodology set by their subject in her two most famous works, Testament of Youth (London: V. Gollancz, 1933) and Testament of Experience (London: V. Gollancz, 1957). Like Brittain, they follow a chronological pattern and offer rich details from letters, interviews, and other histories in order to bring life and nuance to their work. The biography begins several hundred years before the birth of Vera Brittain in Victorian England, in a first chapter appropriately but forbodingly titled “A Bad History of Inheritance and Environment.” The lack of an intellectual tradition in her own family coupled with Brittain’s own early identification with both special teachers and women writers (such as the early feminist Olive Schreiner) encouraged an academic ambition that took her to Somerville, one of Oxford University’s women’s colleges. It is difficult not to read the chapters that follow without a sense of gloom, knowing the effects that World War I would have, both on a personal and international level. Her attraction to Roland Leighton, whose family bore a literary pedigree that impressed Brittain, is superbly chronicled in this biography, with many details of Buxton life, and Brittain’s own evolving thoughts on warfare and patriotism while at Oxford. Difficult as it is to add new detail to Brittain’s second chapter of Testament of Youth, aptly titled “Provincial Young Ladyhood,” Brittain’s biographers manage to convey the stultifying social expectations of this Victorian spa town on an intelligent young woman, as well as her reaction to them. We also learn of Brittain’s need to contribute something of worth to her country, a compulsion that would continue through World War II (by which time she was an avowed pacifist) and that led her to train to wear “the starched blue and white uniform of an auxiliary VAD nurse.” Berry and Bostridge continue, The VAD scheme had been established in 1909 to provide aid to the sick and wounded in the event of a military invasion. At the outbreak of war, the Voluntary Aid Detachments had 74,000 members, and their numbers increased dramatically less than a year later when it was expanded to deal with the severe shortages in the [End Page 267] supply of professional nurses created by the devastating effects of trench warfare. Unlike other war work for women—in the munitions factories or the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, for instance—VADs were almost exclusively drawn from middle- and upper-class families. It was therefore an entirely respectable occupation for a girl of Vera’s background, and Mrs. Brittain had happily cooperated in making arrangements for her at...