Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life by Deborah Gorham (review)

HUMANITIES 323 inappropriate philosophical strait-jacket. Nonetheless, his book is excellent. (MICHAEL STACK) Deborah Gorham. Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life University of Toronto Press. x, 330. $24.95 Vera Brittain is perhaps best known as the author of Testament of Youth, an autobiographical account of her experiences as a Volunteer Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse during the First World War. Upon its publication in 1933, Brittain acknowledged that the best-selling book was >the turning point of my literary career, and after so long a struggle I had at least crossed the Rubicon between obscurity & achievement.= As Deborah Gorham makes clear in her enlightening and accessible biography, Brittain=s life may be read as a series of achievements in twentieth-century writing, feminism, and pacifism. Born in 1893 in Newcastle-under-Lynne, Brittain grew up to reject the traditional, gendered dictates of her upper middle-class family and society, and determined to be a writer. In the summer of 1915 she put her studies at Oxford on hold in order to serve as a VAD, which she did until April 1919, at which point she completed her degree in history. Brittain=s gruelling experiences in England, Malta, and France, coupled with the trauma of losing her fiancé, brother, and two close friends in the war, inspired the feminism and pacifism that would inform her career as novelist, journalist, and activist. Gorham has sifted through an enormous amount of material to produce this book, which was first published in Britain in 1996. She draws especially upon the voluminous diaries and letters in the Vera Brittain Archive at McMaster University in order to offer an intimate and detailed study of a private and public figure. Noting that Brittain=s feminism is the >connecting thread= of her biography, Gorham illuminates how Brittain translated her experiences as a VAD into narratives that radically challenged the profusion of Great War literature appearing in the 1920s which offered only male perspectives. In addition to Testament of Youth, novels such as The Dark Tide (1923) and Not without Honour (1924) uniquely survey the battlefield through a female lens. Gorham shows how Brittain lived out a remarkably modern, feminist revisioning of career, marriage, and motherhood. Having married George Catlin in 1925, she refused to compromise her work by following him to his professor=s post at Cornell University in the United States. Setting up what she called her >Semi-detached Marriage,= she lived with her >soul-mate,= writer Winifred Holtby, in London; Catlin lived alone in Ithaca for the academic year and joined them on his holidays. (This arrangement continued until Catlin=s resignation from Cornell in 1934, and Holtby=s death in 1935; the marriage survived until Brittain=s death in 1970.) During 324 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 this long-distance relationship, Brittain and Catlin had two children, and Brittain established a name for herself, producing throughout her career >some twenty books and thousands of journalistic pieces= which testify to her lifelong commitment to women=s social, sexual, and political concerns. Given the scope of Brittain=s life and work, it is helpful that Gorham consistently historicizes and contextualizes subjects such as VADs, the Western Front, feminism, the League of Nations, and the Chelsea Babies Club, to name a few. Though her narrative follows Brittain=s life from birth to death, it is not a straightforward linear one. She approaches her subject thematically, with useful summaries at the start or end of sections that weave the threads of historical, political, social, and literary analyses into a connected pattern. The book as a whole is immensely engaging because Brittain is a fascinating, complex figure. In the postmodern spirit, Gorham sought to understand the >relationship between Brittain=s experience and her representations of that experience.= Her extensive research into Brittain=s œuvre reveals how Brittain used the many sites available to her B diaries, letters, fiction, and non-fiction B to construct personae that both reflected and directed her sense of self bestriding the stage of twentieth-century feminism and pacifism. Brittain emerges as a writer who challenged traditional literary distinctions that valued men in the public, and devalued women in the private, realms of experience. As Brittain herself affirms...