Vera Brittain: a life between war, peace, and writing

Vera Brittain's early life

Born: December 29, 1893, Newcastle-under-Lyme, England

Died: March 29, 1970, London, England

Vera Brittain is one of the strongest female voices to emerge during the immediate post WWI period, speaking out about true war experiences and taking a decided, anti-war stance. Her non-fictional memories are valued for their lack of sentimentality, their clarity and their objectivity which add force to their message.

Education and war service

Brittain came from a privileged, middle class background. She refused to take on the traditional role of homemaker and convinced her father that she had a right to an education and career. In 1913 she was accepted at Oxford University, but her studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war because she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment, training and serving as a nurse. She served in England, Malta and France and, as she experienced the horrors and suffering, she became deeply disillusioned with the war. Both her fiancé Roland Leighton and her brother Edward, to whom she was very attached, were killed in action. When the war ended, Brittain became involved in the peace movement and started writing feminist and pacifist articles. She joined the Peace Pledge Union which considered war a crime against humanity.

Post-war activism and writing

During WWII, Brittain helped the homeless and sent food relief to starving civilians in occupied territories. After the war she continued to support the PPU but concentrated more on her writing and later became a founding member of The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Brittain described her autobiographical work, Testament of Youth, as her “vehement protest against the war”. It was published in 1933, and it became a bestseller. The memoir describes her youth and her work as a VAD, giving, in one section, a detailed account of her experiences as field hospital nurse in Etaples, France, near the end of WWI. In a tone which is free of sentimentality and self- pity Brittain describes her impossible working conditions- the freezing cold, the lack of medicines and instruments, the understaffing, the continual fear of being bombed, and the suffering of the wounded and dying soldiers who filled her ward. In the text her anger at those who glorified the war bursts through when she expresses the wish that those people could witness first-hand just one case of a mustard gas victim. She graphically describes the dying soldiers as “reeking with mud and foul green stained bandages, shrieking and writhing in a grotesque travesty of manhood”.

Women's role and suffrage

Brittain’s experiences during the First World War were typical of that of many women in that they played a decisive role in the war effort and gained a new self-respect. It was inevitable that in the immediate post-war years their role in society would have to be revalued and, by 1918, they had won the first (partial) right to the vote. Suffrage was granted to all women over 21 in 1928.