Vera Britten: books and biography

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Vera Britten is an English writer, pacifist and feminist. Her autobiographical book The Testaments of Youth brought her fame. The work, first published in 1933, has been reprinted annually. A movie was made based on the book in 1979. During her lifetime, Britten was known internationally as a successful journalist, poet, orator, biographer, and writer. Interest in her personality has steadily grown, especially among feminist critics.

Biography

Vera Brittain was born in Staffordshire, Midlands on December 29, 1893. After a childhood in nearby Macclesfield, she became, as Vera herself wrote, "a provincial young woman" in Buxton, a fashionable Derbyshire resort. She was the older of two children of the prosperous businessman Thomas Britten and Edith Burvon, daughter of an organist and choirmaster. The second was brother Edward, nearly two years younger than Vera.

As soon as she could hold the pen, Vera began to write. She ismaking up stories for her younger brother. Until the age of eleven, she wrote five "novels" illustrated with her own drawings. Britten's desire to succeed resulted in five mature novels published between 1923 and 1948. She consciously intended to write bestsellers, so she used traditional forms of writing without experimenting with more modern methods.

In her works, the writer Vera Britten relied on her own experience, characters and events from real life prevailed over imagination. She tried to base her works on the values associated with her social and political views. As Vera herself wrote, her political beliefs and literary work are closely intertwined. She claimed that the vocation of the writer is to find ideas for changing society and eradicating evil.

When writing the work "Testaments of Youth", the author deliberately applied all novelistic principles. As Vera herself said, she wanted to make her book - true, like a story, but fascinating, like a fairy tale.

Years of youth

As a young girl, Vera studied with famous novelists D. Eliot and A. Bennett. The St. Monica Girls' Boarding School where Vera was sent by her parents was run by one of her mother's sisters and Louise Heath-Jones. The latter was a teacher who was sympathetic to feminism and the work of suffragettes. She introduced Britten to the feminist polemics of writer O. Schreiner, which influenced Vera's beliefs.

Her brother's school friend, R. Layton, whom Vera wasin love, gave her Schreiner's novel The Story of an African Farm, which for a long time became a reference book for the girl. The relationship between Vera and Roland began shortly before the First World War. The girl admired the intellectual and poetic abilities of the young man. His parents were successful novelists.

Determined to continue her education at university, Vera Brittain convinced her parents to let her study for the entrance exam at Somerville (Women's College, Oxford). In the summer of 1914, the girl received a letter that she received a scholarship to study English literature.

World War I years

The First World War began just a few weeks before Vera left for Oxford. Her brother Roland and two of their friends Richardson and Turlough left to serve. Vera also decided to leave Oxford and join the military as a nurse. Roland died at the end of 1915, Richardson and Turlough - in 1917, brother Edward - a few months before the end of the war.

From 1913, Vera regularly kept a diary until she returned to England in 1917. This diary, describing the personal feelings and public events that the girl experienced during the war, covered the period from 1913 to 1917, and was published in 1981 under the title "Testimonies of Youth".

Vera Brittain wrote two autobiographical books based on her second diary covering events between 1932 and 1845, which were published in 1986 and 1989 respectively: Testaments of Friendship and"Testimonies of Experience". The next volume of The Testaments of Time was never published.

Britten's literary achievement as a diarist was firmly established behind her. Her poignant World War I letters published in Letters from a Lost Generation in 1998 also highlight her literary talent for expressing her thoughts and observations.

The only other genre Vera wrote during the war was lyric poetry, and the collection Verses of the VAD (1918) was the first major publication. Here her achievement is debatable, though commendable. But the most common opinion of critics is that her poetry is ordinary and competent.

Literary debut

After the war, Vera Britten returned to Oxford, choosing to study modern history rather than English literature. After graduating from Oxford, in 1921 Vera Britten and Winifred Holtby, with whom she became friends at the university, went to London. In 1923, the writer made her debut with the novel Dark Times.

Britten and Holtby have written on a variety of topics other than feminism, including international politics; for this reason they traveled in 1922 through war-ravaged Europe and observed the activities of the League of Nations in Geneva. As members of the Union of the League of Nations, they appreciated its activities as a peacekeeping organization, and quickly became popular speakers.

At the height of this activity, Britten and Holtby completed their first novels, helping each other with advice and criticism. Vera Brittain's Darkest Novel Rejectedseveral publishers before Grant Richards published it in 1923. The novel drew mixed reviews, both positive and negative.

For this novel, Vera was threatened with prosecution for libel, angry criticism came from Oxford. Due to the novel's unflattering portrayal of life in a women's college, many of the characters were recognizable. Among the few who were delighted with Vera's novel was her future husband, George Catlin. A young political scientist from Oxford began to correspond with a young writer, and two years later convinced Vera to marry him.

However, the novel was edited and reprinted in 1935, and Vera Britten's The Oxford Novel was considered interesting and enjoyable. Its main theme is women's right to independence and self-realization. However, the inability of the author to get out of the controversial topic of self-sacrifice, duty is visible. As the novel ends, Virginia's long, idealistic speech praising self-sacrifice causes confusion, which Britten herself later admitted.

Other works

These two themes, women's right to independence and self-sacrifice, are also seen in Britten's second novel, Not Without Honors (1924). It brings together the feminist, socialist and pacifist themes that dominate Britten's previous novel, which she has identified in her work as inherently connected.

1925 Britten spent in the USA, in 1926 she returned to England. Throughout the next decade, Britten was a successful freelance journalist, but she still wanted to write a bestseller. Publication of the TestamentYouth” by Vera Britten in 1933, which became a bestseller, changed her life: as an international celebrity, Vera was now constantly speaking, lecturing, writing articles and new books.

In 1934, she worked hard. But in 1935, one misfortune after another burst into her life: first her father died, and then Winifred Holtby. After recovering with difficulty from the double whammy, she found solace in a job as Holtby's literary agent, Vera publishing and editing a friend's books.

The Honorable Mention, a novel published in 1936, is Britten's most ambitious work. After the publication of this book, Britten became alarmed by the harbinger of World War II and was forced to devote more time and energy to writing articles and giving speeches in the cause of peacekeeping. She met Anglican clergyman and pacifist Dick Sheppard at a rally, and in 1937 she renounced the League of Nations and joined the new Peace Pledge Union.

In Russian, the book by Vera Britten "Testaments of Youth" was published in 2014. A fragment of this novel has been published online for free. Readers' feedback confirms that this work, one of the best in English literature, is a unique and specific portrait of a young English woman who survived the war years. The book is difficult to attribute to fiction, rather, it is a documentary thing that tells about the crushing loneliness and spiritual devastation of the heroine.

World War II years

During World War II, Vera traveled withperformances in America. Back in her home country of England, she was active in the food aid campaign of the Peace Pledge Union and also worked as a firefighter.

Vera opposed the bombing of German cities by Allied forces. Britten has been heavily criticized for her stance. Vera Britten's name was blacklisted by the Nazis in 2000, who were to arrest her immediately in the UK after the German invasion.

Britten died at Wimbledon on March 29, 1970 at the age of 76. In accordance with the wishes of her mother, her daughter Shirley, a prominent scientist, scattered her ashes at the grave of her brother Edward, who died during the First World War, in Italy. Vera's son John, an artist, wrote a book about his parents. Britten's children also attended the filming of a film about their mother as consultants.