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.
Before embarking on this trip, MR
sought advice from fellow feminist and pacifist Vera Brittain
, who had recently travelled to the US, on how best to approach the American people on the subject of peace.
Literary responses
Maude Royden
Many reviewers praised this book as a quintessential love story. The Christian Science Monitor called it a moving love story, as romantic in its way, as that of the Brownings, while the News Chronicle...
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 et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Pearse supported...
politics
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
EPL
went to prison at least five more times over the course of her fight for female suffrage. She did not suffer from claustrophobia or anxiety in later imprisonments; on the contrary, at times she...
politics
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
Christabel Pankhurst
had escaped imprisonment by going into hiding in Paris. The Pethick-Lawrences were released on bail on 28 March, and their trial was set for 15 May. It ran until 22 May. The...
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...
Publishing
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
At first the journal appeared monthly for threepence an issue, but within six months it began appearing weekly for a penny an issue. Its circulation reached 30,000 by 1909, and much of its profits came...
Literary responses
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
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...
Textual Production
Sylvia Pankhurst
The following year, however, SP
demonstrated diligent care for her mother's reputation: she was outraged by one paragraph in Ray Strachey
's The Cause. Though it expressed gratitude and admiration for Emmeline Pankhurst
...
Literary responses
Sylvia Pankhurst
Save the Mothers was well reviewed. George Bernard Shaw
responded enthusiastically to the book, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
expressed her pleasure at its positive reception. Vera Brittain
also praised it, favourably comparing SP
's activism for...
Textual Production
Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
politics
Lady Ottoline Morrell
She became an activist for pacifism, a movement in which she played many roles. She joined the Union for Democratic Control
, whose meetings were soon being held at her home (and whose members included...
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.
