Vera Brittain

Educated at St. Monica’s School and Somerville College, Oxford, she left to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse (VAD) during the war, being posted to France and Malta.  Brittain was one of the first female students to be granted leave by the college to assist in the war effort.



Vera Brittain is best known for her book Testament of Youth, in which she tells the story of her harrowing experiences in the First World War. It was then that she realised that war wasn’t the glorious adventure many young men thought it to be. Afterwards she became strongly - and famously - associated with the peace movement, to which she was committed for the rest of her life.



In 1914 everything changed. War was something new and unsettling for Vera to understand. In the only way she knew then, she responded to the sense of crisis it created. Conditioned to the traditional public school view that a soldier’s life was a manly and heroic one, she urged her brother to enlist - once again in direct conflict with her father. She was still ignorant of the power and techniques of propaganda: to her, the cleverly-designed recruiting advertisements were honourable and sincere. War, in short, was part of the man’s world from which Vera felt unfairly excluded, a world in which one bravely went to battle when it seemed necessary and honourable to do so. As she said later, she was ‘carried away by the wartime emotion and deceived by the shining figure of patriotism’.



Her first poetry was published in August 1919, Verses of a V.A.D, containing a poem dedicated to Edward, To My Brother.  Her first novel, The Dark Tide, was published in 1923.  A controversial novel of life (and sexism encountered) in Oxford, it was greeted with protest at Oxford University, where it was feared that the book would bring bad publicity. Other novels include Anderby Wold (1923) and South Riding (1936). In 1944 she wrote Seeds of Chaos, a pacifist criticism of World War II and the allied saturation bombing of Germany. Testament to Friendship (1940) is a memorial to her close friend, feminist academic Winifred Holtby. Another memoir, Testament of Experience (1957), covers 1925 to 1950. She also published a number of volumes of poetry.



In 1925 she married political scientist George C. G. Catlin. They had a daughter, Shirley Williams, who was a Labor member of Parliament and served as Education Minister from 1976 to 1979.



Vera Brittain died in Wimbledon on 29 March 1970.  Her ashes were sprinkled over her brother Edward’s grave in Italy, where he died.



In 1981, Brittain's diaries were posthumously published as Chronicle of Youth.



Bibliography source: FirstWorldWar.com