Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life

This is a biographical study of the English writer and social activist Vera Brittain, (1893–1970). Author of more than twenty books and a successful journalist, Brittain is best known for Testament of Youth. Her autobiographical account is remembered as the most important book of the First World War, written from a woman′s perspective. In the interwar decades, Vera Brittain became a staunch advocate of equal rights feminism, an internationalist, and, by the late 1930s, a pacifist. In this book, Deborah Gorham focuses on Vera Brittain′s struggles and achievements as a feminist. She contends that in both her public and private life, Brittain was representative of the group of educated middle–class women who brought to fruition the goals of Victorian bourgeois feminism in the years following the Great War. Drawing on voluminous archival sources and recent feminist scholarship, the author provides an analysis of Vera Brittain which integrates the public and the private, the "personal" and the "political", to illuminate the life, the work and the milieu of this important twentieth–century figure.

Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction. Part I: Macclesfield and Buxton: . 2. Origin, 1893–1911. 3. ′Provincial Young Ladyhood′, 1911–1914. Part II: ′History′s Greatest Disaster′: Love and Work in the Great War: . 4. Somerville, 1914–1915. 5. Love in Wartime. 6. War Work. Part III: ′Lady into Woman′: Friendship, Work and Marriage in the 1920s: . 7. Friendship and Feminism. 8. Feminism and Internationalism. 9. Semi–detached Marriage. Part IV: ′Having Crossed the Rubicon′: The 1930s and After: . 10. The Writing of Testament of Youth. 11. ′Having crossed the Rubicon.′. 12. Conclusion.

Deborah Gorham was born in New York, but has lived for many years in Ottawa, Canada, where she is Professor of History at Carleton University and Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women′s Studies. She has published numerous articles and books on British and Canadian women′s history, including The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (1982), Up and Doing: Canadian Women and Peace (1990), co–edited with Janice Williamson, and Caring and Curing: Historical Perspectives on Women and Healing in Canada (1994), co–edited with Dianne Dodd.

"Gorham has written an important life of Vera Brittain that scholars and students of the period will not want to miss." American Historical Review, June 1997 "By far the most substantial product of academic interest in Brittain to have appeared to date." Times Literary Supplement "Sensitive and compelling biography." The Toronto Star "Gorham is to be commended for producing a balanced book, and for making extensive and intelligent use of feminist criticism. Gorham has been blessed with extensive source materials and has used them well in a fine, provocative, inspiriting biography." The Women′s Review of Books, July 1996