Vera Brittain: A Testament to War and Peace

Mark Bostridge

The writings of Vera Brittain offer remarkable testimony about the impact of the First World War on various sections of British society. In diaries, letters, and ultimately in her searing autobiography of the war years, Testament of Youth, Brittain portrayed the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in hospitals at home and abroad, the young subalterns in the killing fields of Flanders and France, and a civilian population in turmoil, struggling to come to terms with massive loss and bereavement. More generally in her writing, Vera Brittain was intent on using her own experience to convey the strongest abiding belief that the war had left her with "the influence of worldwide events and movements upon the personal destinies of men and women".

Vera Brittain’s personal destiny had seemed an assured and comfortable one. She was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, in Staffordshire, on 29 December 1893, to an affluent middle-class family. Thomas Arthur Brittain, Vera’s father, was a director of the paper manufacturing business established by his paternal grandfather in the 1850s. Like her brother Edward, her junior by two years, Vera was educated at private schools. In 1907, following the family’s move to Buxton in Derbyshire, Vera was sent to St Monica’s School in Kingswood, Surrey. Here she was trained in conventional feminine skills and pursuits. But she also benefited from the more advanced teaching of two women: the school’s co-headmistress, Louise Heath-Jones, who took Vera to a women’s suffrage meeting, lent her Olive Schreiner’s pioneering feminist classic Woman and Labour, and encouraged a growing interest in history and politics, and Edith Fry, whose English lessons encouraged Vera’s literary ambitions.

Returning home to Buxton at the end of 1911, however, Vera felt increasing stifled by what she regarded as the narrow provincialism of her surroundings. Her life as a provincial débutante soon palled. She clashed with her father, who ridiculed her developing feminist beliefs, and rejected a proposal of marriage from a young suitor, whom she later condemned for his "limited brains and evangelical principles". The diary which Vera had started in 1910 now developed into a more earnest ‘Reflective Record’ in which she asserted her determination to be a writer and to record "all the things, absurd, pathetic, interesting, original, humorous, satirical, that strike me as being useful for material." By the autumn of 1913, she had set herself on a path which she hoped would ensure her escape from her stultifying routine, that of sitting the entrance examinations to Somerville College, Oxford. In the first decades of the twentieth century it was still relatively unusual for a woman to attend Oxford University. Opportunities for higher education for women, insofar as they existed, were really limited to those of their sex who were unlikely to marry and faced therefore the prospect of supporting themselves by teaching. Vera clearly didn’t fit into this category. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1914, she won an exhibition to Somerville, academically the most rigorous of Oxford’s three women’s colleges; and that summer, just as the European crisis toppled over into war, she overcame the final hurdle in gaining admission to the University itself by passing the Oxford Senior Local Examination.