Vera Brittain

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Standard Name: Brittain, Vera
Birth Name: Vera Mary Brittain
From her university days before the First World War, VB was determined to be a writer. Her career as a novelist never fulfilled her own expectations; it was not until the publication of Testament of Youth, the first of her volumes combining autobiography with social and cultural history, that she achieved significant success. She also wrote both poetry and pamphlets. Much of her oeuvre is politically engaged, from her feminist journalism and social criticism of the 1920s to her pacifist writings of World War II.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photo of Vera Brittain, looking straight at the camera, wearing a white shirt and a white scarf wrapped around her head.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Doreen Wallace
At Somerville DW became a close friend of Dorothy Sayers (their religious and political disagreements later drove them apart) and in her circle met Vera Brittain , Winifred Holtby , and theSitwells .
Leonardi, Susan J. Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists. Rutgers University Press, 1989.
57
Education Dorothy L. Sayers
She earned first-class Honours, though as a woman she was not yet allowed to take a degree. While at Oxford she met Vera Brittain , who liked her on sight. She dressed flamboyantly and eccentrically...
Education Margaret Kennedy
With the onset of war, the town had largely been emptied of male students, making women a more visible presence around the university. Somerville had a tradition of turning out successful women writers; in entering...
Education Winifred Holtby
During both halves of her time at Oxford she dashed around on a very rusty cycle, cramming myriad activities into her schedule: lectures, tea parties, concerts, lacrosse matches, and meetings. I was born with a...
Family and Intimate relationships Winifred Holtby
During her first year back at Oxford, WH met Vera Brittain , who was also returning to complete her degree.
Berry, Paul, and Mark Bostridge. Vera Brittain: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 1995.
140
After a difficult beginning (they disliked each other at first sight), they became lifelong...
Family and Intimate relationships Winifred Holtby
Vera Brittain , who had believed and encouraged others to believe that WH was in love with Harry Pearson , got another male friend to propose to Holtby on her deathbed, so that she might...
Family and Intimate relationships Storm Jameson
While he studied at the London School of Economics, Jameson supported their household, sometimes taking on more commercial work rather than devoting herself to further intellectual experiment. In their biography of Vera Brittain ,...
Family and Intimate relationships Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
EPL greatly admired Mark Guy Pearse , an evangelical Christian socialist who co-founded the West London Mission . She had known him since her childhood, and he became a second father to her.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Pearse supported...
Friends, Associates Storm Jameson
SJ wrote to Vera Brittain (who had recently reviewed her), thereby initiating a close friendship which, however, was neither wholly relaxed nor in the long run lasting. Jameson and Winifred Holtby , both Yorkshirewomen, more...
Friends, Associates Phyllis Bentley
PB stayed with Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby at the house in Glebe Place in Chelsea where they and Brittain's husband, George Catlin , all lived.
Bentley, Phyllis. "O Dreams, O Destinations". Gollancz, 1962.
174
Brittain, Vera. Chronicle of Friendship. Bishop, AlanEditor , Gollancz, 1986.
38, 56
Friends, Associates Storm Jameson
SJ invited Vera Brittain live with her and her sister's family at Heathfield, the house they had taken at Mortimer in Berkshire. Brittain accepted, and stayed about ten weeks.
Berry, Paul, and Mark Bostridge. Vera Brittain: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 1995.
405, 556
Friends, Associates Phyllis Bentley
At a dinner party at Vera Brittain 's Chelsea house, PB met Naomi Mitchison , Cecil Roberts , and Ellen Wilkinson .
Brittain, Vera. Chronicle of Friendship. Bishop, AlanEditor , Gollancz, 1986.
39-40
Friends, Associates Rose Macaulay
In 1921 RM was spending several nights a week in a room she rented in the large house of writer Naomi Royde-Smith at 44 Prince's Gardens, Kensington.
Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray, 1991.
191
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins, 1972.
100
Chosen by Royde-Smith as a...
Friends, Associates Phyllis Bentley
Vera Brittain introduced PB , during her stay in Chelsea, to birth-control crusader Marie Stopes .
Brittain, Vera. Chronicle of Friendship. Bishop, AlanEditor , Gollancz, 1986.
41
Friends, Associates Winifred Holtby
Through her work with the Six Point Group and Time and Tide, WH met the founder of both, Margaret Haig, Lady Rhondda . Their professional relationship grew into a friendship, and WH dedicated her...

Timeline

14 May 1920
Time and Tide began publication, offering a feminist approach to literature, politics, and the arts: Naomi Mitchison called it the first avowedly feminist literary journal with any class, in some ways ahead of its time.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
168
14 October 1920
A week after the university statutes had finally made women eligible for degrees, women graduates of Oxford gathered for the belated award of degrees which they had earned, most of them, years before.
May 1922
Madeline Linford launched the Manchester Guardianwomen's page, which she produced on her own, with no editorial assistant. It was temporarily suspended during the Second World War.
24 February 1934
The National Council for Civil Liberties was founded by journalist Ronald Kidd , who had witnessed the treatment of hunger marchers in London in November 1932.
7 March 1936
Hitler marched into and appropriated the Rhineland: neither France nor Britain opposed him.
27 September 1939
Warsaw fell to Hitler 's invading army after twenty days' siege and bombardment.
September 1943
The Women's Publicity Planning Association sponsored a mass meeting at Central Hall, Westminster, in support of the proposed Equal Citizenship (Blanket) Bill which would end all forms of sex discrimination.
6 August 1945
The US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima: by early twenty-first century the best estimate of those killed on the spot stood at approaching 140,000 people, plus many thousands more with obvious, serious injury.
17 February 1958
CND, or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , was founded at a public meeting in London; it held its first march that spring, at the Easter weekend.
October 1958
Women Speaking began publication, covering work, religion, education and peace from a feminist angle.
March 1981
Breakaway Labour members of parliament—Roy Jenkins , Shirley Williams (daughter of Vera Brittain ), David Owen , and William Rodgers —left the party to found the Social Democratic Party, or SDP .
November 1981
Shirley Williams (daughter of Vera Brittain ) became the first member of the Gang of Four, leaders of the newly-founded Social Democratic Party , to win a seat in Parliament : for Crosby, Lancashire.
December 1982
Women Speaking, covering work, religion, education and peace from a feminist angle, ended publication in London.