(1893-1970)
British survivor and author. Vera Brittain is best known for her "generational" autobiography of World War I: Testament of Youth (1933). Dedicated to the memory of her fiance, Roland Leighton and her brother Edward Brittain, the autobiography traces her journey from what she called her "provincial young ladyhood"; to World War I when she nursed in England, Malta, and France and watched as, one by one, her closest male companions were killed; through to a postwar commitment to the politics of pacifism. Testament of Youth is unusual in its integration of the generational experience with the woman’s voice. Drawing on her own wartime diaries and letters exchanged between her and her male counterparts, Brittain successfully created a work that was an elegy to those who had died in the war and at the same time legitimized the woman’s war experience both as the waiting and grieving woman and as the war worker.
Vera Mary Brittain was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, on December 29, 1893. At school she encountered the suffrage movement and was especially influenced by Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour. Unwilling to accept the dull routine laid out for the provincial upper-middle-class woman, she worked for and won an exhibition to Somerville College at Oxford. She fully expected to go to Oxford in the autumn of 1914 with her brother Edward and his friend Roland Leighton, but the war intervened, with both Edward and Roland joining up. Although Brittain found undergraduate life at Somerville stimulating, the presence of the war increasingly intruded, particularly after Leighton, with whom she had fallen in love, went to the front in April 1915.
At the end of her first year, determined to come as close as possible to the war experience of her male counterparts, Brittain began training as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse, first in Buxton and then at the First London General, where she started to realize the horror of war through the wounds of the men she nursed. During Roland Leighton’s leave in August 1915, the two became engaged, but Leighton was killed on the western front on December 23, 1915, the day before he was due home on leave. His death left Brittain desolate, and she only gradually recovered some of her former energy and interest in life after she was sent to Malta to nurse in September 1916. In the spring of 1917, however, two more close male friends were killed. Brittain returned home but requested to be sent to France when Edward, who had been wounded in 1916, went back to the front later in the year. In France, she nursed through the German push in the spring of 1918. She would later date her commitment to pacifism to this period when, nursing German prisoners, she recognized the absurdity of her nursing them when only days before her brother had been trying to kill them. In July 1918, her brother was killed in Italy, a final blow after the physical and emotional misery of the war and one from which she would never recover.
After the war, she returned to Oxford, burdened by a legacy of grief and emotional exhaustion from the war. Friendship with the writer Winifred Holtby aided in restoring her equilibrium, and after graduating, the two shared a flat in London where Brittain committed herself to international relations and pacifism through the League of Nations and Canon "Dick" Shep-pard’s Peace Pledge Union. With the publication of Testament of Youth in 1933, she became much sought after as a lecturer and journalist, and she continued to work on fiction. Her novel Honourable Estate, which deals extensively with World War I and its aftermath, was published in 1936. Holtby’s death in 1935 was necessarily a severe blow to Brittain, who had only just begun to let go of the ghosts from her wartime past.
Throughout World War II, Brittain maintained her pacifism in the face of much criticism and even ostracism. She published the ongoing Letters to Peace Lovers throughout the war, during which she lived mostly in London, and she was outspoken in her revulsion at Britain’s blanket bombing of German cities. She continued to lecture and write and to work for international peace almost until her death on March 29, 1970.
Renewed interest in Brittain’s life and work was stimulated by a television series based on Testament of Youth, broadcast in 1979, closely followed by Alan Bishop’s edition of Brittain’s World War I diaries (Chronicle of Youth, 1981). Further editions of Brittain’s diaries (Chronicle of Friendship, 1986; Wartime Chronicles, 1986) reveal an interesting commentary on Europe and Britain in the 1930s, including a visit to Hitler’s Germany and a day-by-day account of life in London during the blitz and throughout the war years.
