num_pages: 330
description: Deborah Gorham's biography of Vera Brittain (1893-1970) is an elegant study of a British writer and social activist whose status in the chronicle of British history and feminism is almost legendary. Brittain is best known for her autobiographical work, Testament of Youth (1933), one of the most moving books written about the First World War, and the most famous one written by a woman. Brittain lost her brother, her fiancT, and friends in the war, and she participated herself as a nurse at the front; she wrote about the experience with passion. She was also an important British feminist in the interwar period, as well as a pacifist and a journalist. Concerned primarily with Brittain's struggles and achievements as a feminist, Gorham contrasts the public narrative of Brittain's novels and memoirs and the private life revealed in the letters and papers found in the Vera Brittain Archive at McMaster University. She argues that Brittain was representative of a group of educated middle-class women who brought to fruition the goals of Victorian bourgeois feminism in the years following the First World War. Gorham concentrates on the most active part of Brittain's astonishing life and superbly describes how Brittain developed as a feminist and as a writer before the Second World War. A beautifully written and intelligent book, Deborah Gorham's "Vera A Feminist Life" is diverse in its appeal. It is lively, engaging, and accessible to general readers, but it is also a book that should be read by students of twentieth-century Britain, the history of feminism, war, and class, as well as literature and biography.
language: English
title: Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life
titlecomplete: Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life
genres: World War I, Nonfiction, Biography
ratings_count: 9
publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr