The Friendships of Women": Friendship, Feminism and Achievement in Vera Brittain's Life and Work in the Interwar Decades

'The Friendships of Women7': Friendship, Feminism and Achievement in Vera Bnttain's Life and Work in the Interwar Decades Deborah Gorham The literary critic Carolyn Heilbrun has written recently that the relationship between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby was "an exemplary love."1 In Heübrun's view, Testament of Friendship2 is "an ideal, rare counterexample" in a literary tradition that has denigrated women's friendships. For me, the most remarkable feature of Heübrun's treatment of Brittain and Holtby is that she confuses the actual friendship with Brittain's reconstruction of it. The distinguished critic's overly hasty acceptance of Testament of Friendship as factual narrative is not the result of naivete: it appears as part of a perceptive analysis of women's autobiography in which Heübrun is centrally concerned with the relationship between experience and writing. Heübrun's conflation of experience with literary construction in this instance arises, rather, from the fact that she shares with Brittain the political objective of rehabilitating women's friendships . Brittain explicitly acknowledged that one major purpose of Testament of Friendship was to validate women's love for each other. As she stated in the book's prologue: "From the days of Homer the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women . . . have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted."3 From the perspective of feminist politics, the defense of female friendship offered by Heübrun (or by Brittain fifty years earlier) is eminently sound. However, the tendency to distort the evidence in order to support that analysis, which is exemplified in Heübrun's statements about Brittain and Holtby, arises because the subject of female friendship has become ideologically charged. Women's special capacity for friendship has become of such vital importance to contemporary feminism that it has become difficult to say anything about it that might be construed as negative. Indeed, as a response to misogynist misrepresentation, contemporary feminism has imparted to sisterhood a sacral character, and this has affected not only feminist politics but feminist scholarship. Contemporary historical scholarship on women's friendship began with CarroU Smith-Rosenberg's path-breaking article "The Female World of Love and Ritual."4 In her portrayal of the nineteenth-century female friendships that were the object of her study and of the wider female network in which they were embedded, Smith-Rosenberg emphasized the © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol 3 No. 3 (Winter) 1992 Deborah Gorham 45 richness of the culture women created for themselves and claimed that their friendships were both satisfying and remarkably free from conflict. Whüe Smith-Rosenberg's work offered valuable insights, it also has contributed to the creation of a vision of a lost Arcadia of conflict-free sisterhood . Historians of women's friendship have only recently turned their attention to the transitionaLdecades of the early twentieth century. For the middle class these years were crucial, for it was then that the homosocial structures of the nineteenth century were eroding and kinship networks were dedining in importance. For the first time it became genuinely possible for a significant number of middle-class women to escape the confines of nineteenth-century farnüy life and to create new structures as weU as new definitions for female friendships. Vera Brittain's experience provides excellent opportunities for a critical exploration of women's friendship in the interwar decades. In this paper I examine Brittain's public statements about friendship and the friendships she actuaUy formed, from her Edwardian girlhood to her intimate adult friendships, and the wider friendship network in which she lived and worked in the years following the First World War. Vera Brittain: The Early Years: 1893-1919 The household into which Vera Brittain was born in December, 1893, was comfortable, secure, and weU ordered. The nature of a daughter's relationship with her mother is of paramount importance, and in this respect Vera was fortunate in her early years.5 Her mother was a reassuring central figure, and Vera loved her mother unreservedly. The tensions later developed between mother and daughter when the adolescent Vera's ambitions clashed with Edith Brittain's calm...