Vera Brittain

Vera Mary Brittain (born December 29, 1893 in Newcastle-under-Lyme , † March 29, 1970 in Wimbledon ) was a British writer, feminist and pacifist. She was best known for her successful memoir Testament of Youth , published in 1933 , in which she reports on her experiences during the First World War and her change to a pacifist.

Life

Brittain was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1893 to a wealthy family who owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton . She lived a quiet childhood together with her only, younger brother as the closest confidante. At the age of 18 months she moved with her family to Macclesfield , at the age of 11 she moved to Buxton . When Brittain was 13, she attended St Monica's boarding school in Kingswood, Surrey, which her aunt ran.

She postponed her degree in English literature at Somerville College in Oxford in the summer of 1915 to take part in the First World War as a nurse in the VAD ( Voluntary Aid Detachment ). Her fiancé Roland Leighton , friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, and her brother Edward were all killed during the war. Their mutual letters are documented in the book Letters from a Lost Generation .

When she returned to Oxford after the war to study history, Brittain found it difficult to adapt to the life of the post-war generation. It was around this time that she met Winifred Holtby , a writer and journalist, with whom she developed a close friendship that lasted until Holtby's death in 1935. Both aspired to rise in the London literary scene.

Brittain married the political scientist and philosopher George Catlin (1896–1979) in 1925 . Their son John Brittain-Catlin (1927–1987) later became a painter, was a businessman and author of the 1987 autobiography Family Quartet . Their daughter is the former minister and politician Shirley Williams ( Liberal Democrats ).

Vera Brittain's first novel was The Dark Tide (1923). In 1933 she published Testament of Youth , followed by the sequels Testament of Friendship (1940) - with which she honored Winifred Holtby's biography - and Testament of Experience (1957), the continuation of her own story from 1925 to 1950. Brittain wrote hers Novels from the bottom of my heart, linking many of them to actual experiences and living people. Your novel Honorable Estate (1936) can therefore also be counted among the memoirs .

In the 1920s she became a regular spokesperson for the League of Nations Union , a British organization of the League of Nations . In June 1936, however, she was invited to deliver a speech at a peace rally in Dorchester, which also included Anglical clergy Dick Sheppard, George Lansbury , playwright Laurence Housman and pacifist Donald Soper. Sheppard then invited her to join the British Peace Pledge Union , which, after careful deliberation, she did in January 1937. In the same year she also joined the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship . Her newfound pacifism became apparent during World War II when she began the Letters to Peacelovers series .

As a practicing pacifist, she helped wage war by serving as a civil defense fire watchman and by traveling the country raising donations for the Peace Pledge Union food aid . Because she spoke out against the bombing of German cities in her magazine Massacre by Bombing (1944), she was denigrated. Her principled pacifist attitude was rehabilitated to some extent when it turned out in 1945 that her name appeared on the " Special wanted list G. B. " This list included people who were to be arrested immediately after a German invasion of Great Britain.

In November 1966 she fell on a poorly lit street in London on her way to a speech. She still gave the talk, but later found out that she had broken her left arm and the little finger on her right hand. These injuries marked the beginning of a physical decline, as a result of which she became increasingly confused and withdrawn.

Vera Brittain never completely got over the death of her brother Edward. In her will, she decreed that her ashes should be scattered over Edward's grave on the Asiago plateau in Italy , "as much of my life had remained in this Italian village cemetery for almost 50 years". She died on March 29, 1970 at Wimbledon at the age of 76. Her daughter complied with her mother's request in September 1970.

Cultural heritage and honors

Vera Brittain was portrayed in the 1979 TV version of Testament of Youth on BBC Two by Cheryl Campbell. In Germany the five or six-part series ran under the title Testament einer Jugend .

Vera-Brittain-Ufer in Hamburg

Vera-Brittain-Ufer in Berlin-Mitte

The songwriter Sue Gilmurray, just like Brittain a member of the Anglican pacifism movement, wrote a song entitled "Vera", with which he commemorated Brittain.

In 1998, Brittain's letters from World War I were edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge and published under the title Letters from a Lost Generation . They were also edited by Bostridge for BBC Radio 4 and set to music with Amanda Root and Rupert Graves .

'Because You Died', a new selection of Brittain's World War I poetry and prose, edited by Mark Bostridge, was published by Virago in 2008 to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the armistice.

On November 9, 2008, BBC One aired an hour-long documentary about Brittain as part of its Remembrance Day program. Jo Brand hosted the show.

In February 2009 it was reported that BBC Films was editing Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth for cinema.

Since 2014 there has been a “Vera-Brittain-Ufer” in Hamburg- Mitte. The text on the corresponding street sign reads: “Vera-Brittain-Ufer: after Vera Mary Brittain (1893–1970), English writer, pacifist and feminist; protested during the Second World War in Great Britain against the area bombing of German cities and particularly denounced the destruction of Hamburg ”.

In 2016 a “Vera-Brittain-Ufer” was named in Berlin- Mitte as part of the Spree- Promenade, opposite the Berlin Cathedral . On a - very small - additional sign one reads: "Vera Brittain [...] protested during the Second World War against the bombing of the civilian population of Berlin and other German cities".

Works

• 1923 - The Dark Tide
• 1929 - Halcyon: Or, The Future of Monogamy
• 1933 - Testament of Youth
• 1936 - Honorable Estate
• 1940 - Testament of Friendship
• 1943 - "One of these Little Ones ...", A Plea to Parents and Others for Europe's Children
• 1944 - Massacre by Bombing
• 1945 - Above All Nations, together with George Catlin, foreword by Victor Gollancz
• 1957 - Testament of Experience
• 1981 Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913-1917
• 2006 - One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War ("Humiliation with Honor" and "Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means" with a foreword by Vera Brittain's daughter Shirley Williams)

Biographies

• Vera Brittain: A Life, by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Chatto & Windus, 1995, Pimlico, 1996, Virago 2001, 2008 ISBN 1-86049-872-8 .
• Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life, by Deborah Gorham, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8020-8339-0 .

literature

• Brief biography of Paul Berry, your administrator, in the foreword to the Virago edition of Testament of Experience (1980).
• Vera Britains profile on the Peace Pledge Union website, accessed June 2008
• The making of a peacenik , Mark Bostridge, The Guardian , August 30, 2003, accessed June 2008

Web links

Commons : Vera Brittain  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• The Vera Brittain Collection at Oxford University's The First World War Poetry Digital Archive contains images of Britains war poetry manuscripts, letters, the diary and searchable corpora of text.
• Pictures from Vera Brittain at JAMD.
• Biography and list of works on Litweb.
• Vera Brittain in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved September 5, 2017.
• Archival material relating to Vera Brittain listed at the UK National Register of Archives

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Paul Berry in the preface to Testament of Experience , 1980 edition of Virago
2. ↑ Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life, 1995
3. ^ Prose & Poetry - Vera Brittain , August 2001 on First World War.com, accessed May 27, 2008
4. ↑ cable one series dictionary
5. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated July 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ [1]
7. ↑ Vera Brittain to be subject of film. In: Daily Telegraph , February 13, 2009