Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Vera Brittain
-
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.
Vera Brittain
introduced PB
, during her stay in Chelsea, to birth-control crusader Marie Stopes
.
Brittain, Vera. Chronicle of Friendship. Editor Bishop, Alan, Gollancz.
41
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.
191
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins.
100
Chosen by Royde-Smith as a...
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...
Friends, Associates
Una Marson
In May 1949, UM
invited Vera Brittain
to Kingston to speak to young Jamaican writers and encourage their literary work.
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press.
Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline. My Part in a Changing World. Hyperion.
338
Back in England, she contacted Vera Brittain
after having read Brittain's Testament of Youth, 1933, to invite Brittain to visit the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Olive Schreiner
To Vera Brittain
and some of her contemporaries, Women and Labour was the Bible of the Women's Movement. It influenced the writings of many early-twentieth-century feminists, including historian Alice Clark
and suffragette Constance Lytton
Intertextuality and Influence
May Cannan
The critic and family friend Sir Walter Raleigh
, who saw these poems before publication, called them heart-breaking and terribly naked.
Cannan, May, and Bevil Quiller-Couch. “Editorial Materials”. The Tears of War, edited by Charlotte Fyfe, Cavalier Books, p. Various pages.
EPL
's involvement in the militant suffrage movement was necessarily controversial: contemporaries both lauded and reviled her. In her diary Virginia Woolf
described EPL
's style of public speaking in 1918 with some disdain. I...
Literary responses
Jan Struther
Responses in England were more mixed. Hardly any reviewers were able to refrain from snide comment about the inaccurate representation of their country, but most added a saving clause: the film was genuinely moving. But...
Literary responses
Stella Benson
Forty-six years after Benson's death, Naomi Mitchison
acknowledged that her work had ceased being read, that her fantasy was misunderstood as whimsy. She felt, however, that in 1979 a revival was due.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
127
It is...
Literary responses
Annie S. Swan
Among this book's admirers was Winifred Holtby
, who had proffered advice from herself and Vera Brittain
not to worry about reviews, and who then wrote favourable ones herself for both Good Housekeeping and Time...
