Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

World War I holds a powerful position in Western thought, not only as a
historical event of unimaginable horror, but also as a nostalgic symbol
of loss of innocence, an innocence taken with the lives of battalions of
young men. Much of this mythic innocence is sentimental nonsense; yet
there is enough truth in it to grip our imaginations still.

Deborah Gorham explores the war and postwar life and writings of one
survivor of the Great War: Vera Brittain, a young woman of an
upper-middle-class family who, like so many of her sisters, lost both
beloved brother and fiancé as well as close male friends, but
nonetheless served as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment.
Brittain’s memoir, A Testament of Youth (1933), is superb
life-writing. Moreover, it is the best war memoir written by a woman.
The book was immediately embraced as a masterpiece at its London
publishing and when Brittain sailed to New York for the North American
launch, she was greeted with Macmillan’s window on Fifth Avenue
crammed with copies of her book.

Gorham celebrates Brittain’s accomplishments both as participant in
and memoirist of the war; but she goes further, following Brittain’s
life in peace and elucidating her developing feminism at Somerville, the
Oxford women’s college she attended before leaving to nurse in
England, Malta, and on the Western Front in France and where she again
took up her studies in 1919.

Brittain was to publish 20 books, and her work, like her life, is
marked by feminism. Indeed, Gorham maintains that feminism was the
“central organizing principle” of Brittain’s personality. It is
not surprising, given Brittain’s valiant career as a battlefield
nurse, that women’s right to paid work was a cause she championed,
writing in 1927 that work “has been the twentieth century’s great
gift to women; it is dignified work which puts her ... upon the same
level as men.”

Gorham has done the disciplines of history and women’s studies an
outstanding service with this meticulous, scholarly treatment of one of
Western feminism’s heroic foremothers—writer, nurse of the Great
War, pioneering feminist, and mother.