Vera Brittain
| Vera Brittain | |
|---|---|
| Born |
29 December 1893 Newcastle Under Lyme, Staffordshire, England |
| Died | 29 March 1970 (aged 76) Wimbledon, London, England |
| Occupation |
|
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Somerville College, Oxford |
| Genre | |
| Notable works | Testament of Youth |
| Children | John Brittain-Catlin Shirley Williams |
Vera Mary Brittain (29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse, writer, feminist, and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brittain was the daughter of a well-to-do family who owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton. She was the daughter of paper manufacturer Thomas Arthur Brittain (1864-1935) and his wife, Edith Bervon Brittain (1868-1948). She had an uneventful childhood with her only brother her closest companion. At eighteen months, her family moved to Macclesfield, Cheshire, and when she was eleven they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire. From the age of thirteen, she attended boarding school at St Monica's, Kingswood, Surrey where her aunt was the principal.
After overcoming her father's initial objections, she studied English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, delaying her degree after one year in the summer of 1915 to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse for much of the First World War, initially in Buxton and later in London, Malta and France. Her fiancé Roland Leighton, close friends Victor Richardson M.C. and Geoffrey Thurlow, and her brother Edward Brittain M.C. were all killed during the war. Their letters to each other are documented in the book Letters from a Lost Generation. In one letter Leighton speaks for his generation of public school volunteers when he writes that he feels the need to play an 'active part' in the war.
Returning to Oxford after the war to read History, Brittain found it difficult to adjust to life among the postwar generation. It was at this time that she met Winifred Holtby, and a close friendship developed, with both aspiring to become established on the London literary scene. The bond lasted until Holtby's death from renal failure in 1935. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville College included Dorothy L. Sayers, Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy, and Sylvia Thompson.
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