Literature
Vera Brittain
Vera Brittain was a British writer, feminist, and pacifist known for her memoir "Testament of Youth," which recounts her experiences during World War I. She also wrote novels, poetry, and works on feminism and pacifism. Brittain's writing often reflects her advocacy for social justice and her personal experiences of loss and resilience during wartime.
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4 Key excerpts on "Vera Brittain"
eBook - PDFFeminism and Women's Writing
An Introduction
- Catherine Riley, Lynne Pearce(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
This has had repercussions for feminist analyses of both writerly and readerly engage- ments with the genre. Case study 9.1 Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was published in 1933, and was an immediate success, selling out its first print run of 3,000 copies on the day of its release. Brittain’s literary contemporaries were united in their praise for her memoir, with Rebecca West, Pamela Hinkson and Storm Jameson (other notable first-wave feminists) among those British women writers who gave her glowing reviews. Virginia Woolf later wrote to Brittain Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. 164 FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S WRITING to acknowledge the links the book made for her between feminism and pacifism, themes that Woolf would make central to much of her own writing in the years that followed. Testament of Youth was published at the same time as autobiographical texts by other feminist writers, such as Beatrice Webb and Sylvia Pankhurst, and was part of a literary ‘moment’ – for the first time, women took on autobiographical writing to celebrate their lives, and to wrest the genre from men who had made it a ‘masculine’ mode of expression. The popular conceptualisation of autobiography as a male form of writing meant that Brittain had, at first, tried to write her story as fiction: first she made several attempts at fictionalising her wartime experiences, without much success. It was only when she decided to write as herself that her authorial voice seemed to flow and the events she had endured were given a poignant immediacy to which readers could relate. In Testament of Youth, the words seemed to pour out of her, a potent mixture of rage and loss, underpinned by lively intelligence and fervent pacifist beliefs. (Day 2013) Giving herself the freedom to write in her own voice meant that Brittain was able, finally, to articulate the particular experience of being a woman and living through the war.
- Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter, Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Carol Acton 13 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933) Abstract: Vera Brittan ’ s bestselling memoir, Testament of Youth, (1933), has become central to the way the British women ’ s story of the First World War is remembered and interpreted. It movingly draws readers into her wartime love affair with Roland Leight-on, her warm relationship with her brother and her desolation at their deaths and the deaths of two close friends. While Brittain wrote the memoir in part to warn against what she called ‘ the glamour ’ of war and the naivety of her generation in accepting the rhetoric that sent so many men to the front, her need to find consolation and meaning in the deaths of those she memorialises causes her to construct them as heroic, thus leading her back into the very rhetoric she wishes to interrogate. Key Terms: Mourning, women ’ s perspective, autobiography 1 Context Vera Brittain (1893 – 1970) is best known for the war memoir, Testament of Youth (1933), a narrative defined by youthful naivety, wartime love, grief, and ultimate disil-lusionment. In planning it Brittain raised the rhetorical question, “ who will write the epic of the women who went to war? ” “ Does no one remember the women who began their war work with such high ideals, or how grimly they carried on when that flaming faith had crumbled into the grey ashes of disillusion. ” (Brittain 1979 [1957], 77) Rather than choosing fiction, she concluded of autobiography that “ nothing else is stark en-ough, nothing else so direct ” (Brittain 1979 [1957], 77), and the stark representation of wartime grief and loss is arguably what makes the memoir so unforgettable.
eBook - ePubWomen and Peace
Theoretical, Historical and Practical Perspectives
- Ruth Roach Pierson(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Vera Brittain. Chronicle of Youth: War Diary 1913–1917 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1981).4 Brittain produced her first novel at the age of seven and a further four before the age of eleven. Her determination to achieve her literary ambitions was fortunately unbounded since she had to overcome both parental and societal constraints. But Brittain did find support at her boarding school—St. Monica’s in Kingswood, Surrey-where the progressive headmistress, Miss Heath-Jones, nurtured and encouraged Brittain’s nascent feminism. See also VBC/G490, Vera Brittain, “Were Women Meant to Have Brains?,” Quiver , February, 1935.5In cities and in hamlets we were born, And little towns behind the van of time; A closing era mocked our guileless dawn With jingles of a military rhyme. But in that song we heard no warning chime, Nor visualized in hours benign and sweet The threatening woe that our adventurous feet Would starkly meet.Vera Brittain, “The War Generation: Ave,” in Poems of the War and After (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934).6 Both Roland Leighton and Edward Brittain wrote detailed, graphic and poignant letters to Vera Brittain. These may be found in VBC, McMaster University.7 This mood is perfectly captured in the poetry of Rupert Brooke. The reality of the horrors and suffering of trench warfare is to be found in the poetry of Siegfried Sasson, Isaac Rosenberg and the matchless work of Wilfred Owen.8 VBC/H341, Vera Brittain, “From War to Pacifism,” published in Forward , 9 September 1939 under the title, “What can we do in War Time? Work for a Sane Peace.”9
eBook - PDFWomen's Autobiography
War and Trauma
- V. Stewart(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Vera Brittain and the ‘Lost Generation’ 33 She decides to continue with her work only at the last minute, while packing to leave, after being overwhelmed by a passionate conviction that to give up the work and the place I hated would be defeat, and that Roland, and what- ever in the world stood for Right and Goodness, wanted me to remain at the hospital and go on active service. (Brittain, Testament of Youth, p. 263) Brittain recognizes, in Testament of Youth, the idealistic nature of this faith in Right and Goodness, and attempts to undercut the whiff of martyrdom contained in this decision. She also foreshadows here the sense of emptiness and lack of fulfilment which hits home at the end of the war, when she realizes that this faith was misplaced. However, the factors that influenced Brittain’s decision to go to war in the first place are also relevant here. To identify these, it is necessary to trace the development of her attachment to Leighton, an attachment which although it took on the features of a romance, was initially based on imitation and aspiration. In Testament of Youth, Brittain attributes the beginnings of her awakening into feminism to the good fortune of having met an unconventional teacher at her otherwise unprogressive boarding school. Notably, Miss Heath-Jones lends her a copy of Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour during her final term in 1911, and Brittain claims that this text helped her to envision ‘a world in which women would no longer be the second-rate, unimportant creatures that they were now considered’ (Testament of Youth, p. 41). However, Brittain was not immune to the contradictions that afflicted Schreiner and other feminists of that earlier generation. Cate Haste suggests that Schreiner ‘experienced continual internal conflict between her background, and the shame then associated with female sexual feelings, and her search for an intellectual idea of compan- ionate and equal relationships’ (p. 8).
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