Vera Brittain novels

 Im reading a  novel by Vera Brittain, having not read any of her work for many years.  It reminded me what a tragic life she had.  I've never been a big fan but reading Honourable Estate made me remember her early life which had so much pain because of World War One.  

Vera was born in 1893 in Staffordshire, in the Midlands, and was the daughter of Arthur and Edith Brittain. Her family owned paper mills and were comfortably off middle class and very conventional. They moved to Cheshire, and then later to the Spa Town of Buxton in Derbyshire...   She was intelligent and very keen on learning and was sent to a boarding school, in Surrey.  When she left school, her father and mother expected her to do the social round and marry but she hated the idea and after 2 years, she persuaded her father to let her go to Oxford.  She had one brother Edward who was very close to her. 

She began her studies at Oxford in 1914 hoping to escape the boredom of provincial life.  However war had broken out and she felt that it was not right to be at college when the world was in such turmoil - her brother and other young men that she knew were all volunteering for the army, including Roland Leighton, a young writer who had become her fiance.  She wanted to be close to him so she joined the VADs, volunteer nurses who were working for the war effort. She nursed in London and then went to France, during which time she nursed German Prisoners of war.  Her fiance Roland and her brother were killed along with other male friends.  

Vera had begun the war feeling patriotic but as she lost loved ones and saw the horrors of the war, she began to veer towards socialism and pacifism.  She returned to England and then went back to Oxford in 1919.  She found it hard to fit in there, feeling that she had been marked forever by the pain and suffering she had witnessed and she did not get on with some of the other young women who seemed indifferent to it.  

She became friends with Winifred Holtby, another would be writer, who also favoured liberal causes but was less emotional and extreme than Brittain. They did not like each other at first but became friends, and then after college they decided to move to London and share a flat, earning a living by writing and working for the various good causes they supported. 

Both women found that their middle class families were not that keen on them abandoning their homes to work, and expected them to come home whenever there was a domestic problem or crisis. 

Vera began writing, but her novels were always rather too heavily based on her own real life.  She lacked the ability to stand outside herself... but she had some talent.....Honourable Estate is a novel based on her war experiences... However instead of a lover like Roland Leighton, she gives her heroine a love affair with American soldier Eugene Meury, which is based on her love for her American publisher.  The heroine Ruth Alleynedene, is like Vera the daughter of a well to do businessman in the Potteries, who is not happy with his daughter's going to college, nor taking up war work or socialism, but who accepts her independence, reluctantly.... 

Will write a bit more about  her and Holtby.