University of Tulsa

Reflections on Feminism and Pacifism in the Novels of Vera Brittain

Author(s): Muriel Mellown
Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 215-228
Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463721 .
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 Reflections on Feminism and Pacifism
in the Novels of Vera Brittain

Muriel Mellown
North Carolina Central University

It has been the common fate of feminists in the past to be firstridiculed,

then ignored, and finally consigned to total obscurity. Outstanding among
those whose work has in recent years been at least partially rescued from
oblivion is Vera Brittain (1893-1970). Vera Brittain's early life has been the
subject of a successful television series, Testament of Youth; several of her
books, including Testament of Youth, Testament of Experience, and Testament
of Friendship,have been reissued in both England and the United States; and
her early war diary has been published under the title Chronicle of Youth,
Interest in Vera Brittain was further sparked when her daughter, Shirley
Williams, became a founder of the new Social Democratic Party in England.
In many ways Vera Brittain represented the informed, liberal thinker of
her day, and her work reflectsthe major intellectual trends which developed
in England in the firsthalf of the twentieth century. Feminism, socialism,
and pacifism were throughout her life her principal concerns. She began her
career in London in the early 1920s afterthree years' nursing in France and
Malta during World War I and three years at Oxford University, where she
received a degree in history in 1921. In 1922 she became a regular speaker
for the League of Nations Union, which organization she considered "the
one element of hope and progress contained in the peace treaties."1 Two
years later she joined the Labour Party and became active in politics,
working with her husband, the political philosopher, George Catlin, in
several parliamentary campaigns. During the years between the wars she
established herself as a leading feminist journalist and contributed frequent
reviews and articles to such periodicals as the Manchester Guardian, the
YorkshirePost, Time and Tide, and the Nation, Her life took a somewhat
different,though not unexpected, turn in the late 1930s. A pacifist since
those early nursing days, when she had seen at firsthand the horrors of
trench warfare, Brittain now committed herself to the peace movement,
and throughout the war pacifism claimed her exclusive attention. Only after
1945 was she free to resume her work forthe advancement of women. In the

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last decades of her life she combined feminism and pacifism, continuing to
work forboth causes until her final illness.
A prolific writer,Vera Brittain issued a steady stream of works. When she
died in 1970 she left, in addition to innumerable journal articles, twenty-
nine books including novels, poetry, autobiographies, biographies, and
sociological and political studies. Of these, Testament of Youth (1933), which
describes her experiences in World War I, will certainly prove to be her
most lasting achievement. But her five novels, The Dark Tide (1923), Not
Without Honour (1924), Honourable Estate (1936), Account Rendered (1945),
and Born 1925 (1948), although almost completely unknown today, have
considerable significance in that they record some of the major events and
ideas of the time.
Brittain contended that a principal function of the novel is to reveal the
impingement of public affairson private lives. While acknowledging that
her closeness to the events depicted prevented her fromseeing them in their
final perspective, she nevertheless presented in her novels a picture of the
main upheavals of the century. Drawing on her own experiences, often
modelling her characters on real persons and tracing always the course of
actual history, she rooted her novels firmlyin fact. But their importance
does not lie simply in their historical accuracy. Brittain conceived of these
novels as furtherweapons in her campaign for women. In them, as surely as
in her journalism, she wrote to analyze the existing conditions of society and
to indicate the directions which future progress should take. She states her
theory of the novel in the foreword to Honourable Estate, where she declares:
"If large areas of human experience?political, economic, social, religious-
are to be labelled inadmissible as subjects for fiction, then fiction is doomed
as organic art."2 The novels, then, provide a detailed statement of the
concerns and principles common in feminist thought during the decades
following the attainment of the vote.
The firsttwo novels present the feminist view of education. Clearly they
derived from the author's own struggles to break away from the conven?
tional mold of the provincial young lady and win a place for herself in the
intellectual world. The Dark Tide, begun while Brittain was still a student,
tells the story of two young women who at the end of the war return to
Oxford as undergraduates. Virginia Dennison, the more intellectual and
assured of the two, turns down a proposal of marriage from a young don,
Raymond Sylvester, who then marries her friend, Daphne Lethridge. The
marriage proves to be a failure, largely because of Sylvester's selfishness and
cruelty, and the novel ends with Daphne's determining to bring up her
deformed son by herself. In later years Brittain admitted the obvious
immaturity of the work, "the crude violence of its methods and the un?
modified black-and-whiteness of its values."3 Yet it is important as an early

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indication of the author's fundamental concerns: it gives an accurate picture
of the unnecessary restrictions imposed upon young women at Oxford in
1920; it traces the rapid deterioration of a marriage when the husband
dominates his wife completely; and it reveals how a weak character such as
Daphne may eventually gain courage and resolution from the "dark tide" of
suffering.
While the firstnovel thus recounts the problems of undergraduate life, its
successor, Not Without Honour, shows the other side of the coin, the
difficultieswhich beset the intelligent young woman who is compelled to
remain at home. The heroine, Christine Merivale, leaves school and returns
to her home, a resort town on the North East coast. Here she rebels against
the customary notion that she will sit at home until she marries. Her
independent thinking on religion and marriage shocks her parents, and her
friendship with a married curate of progressive views scandalizes the neigh?
borhood. As in The Dark Tide, the feminist themes are clearly stated, but
their impact is lessened by overdramatized events and characters who fail to
emerge as living personages. Among both reviewers and the general public,
the work enjoyed little success, and as a result Brittain set aside fiction for
some time. During the next few years she concentrated on journalism and
on the autobiographical Testament of Youth, a form which proved better
suited to her talents and which on its publication in 1933 won for her
considerable fame.
Vera Brittain's third novel, Honourable Estate, not published until 1936,
was much more ambitious than its predecessors. The most successful of her
novels, and the one that most fully presents the feminist point of view, it
resulted fromdrawing together material originally intended fortwo separate
works. Brittain had long been planning a novel based on stories of her own
family in Staffordshire.At the same time she had projected a book portray?
ing the unhappy marriage of her husband's parents, his father having been a
conventional clergyman and his mother a rebellious, politically-minded
suffragette.As she brooded on these subjects, she hit on the simple expedi?
ent of combining them by continuing the narrative into the next generation
and having the son of one household marrythe daughter of the other.4 Thus
Honourable Estate developed into a lengthy novel which covers the years
1894 to 1930 and presents a wide panorama of ideas and events in that age of
transition.
The novel traces the history of two families, the Rutherstons and the
Alleyndenes. Janet Rutherston, a clergyman's wife and mother of one son,
Denis, is a suffragettewho finds her greatest happiness in political work and
in her friendship with a woman dramatist, Gertrude Ellison Campbell.
Eventually separating from her husband, she goes to work in an East End
slum settlement where she dies in 1917, just after the vote is extended to

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women. Growing up at the same time as Denis is Ruth Alleyndene, a young
woman who, in the face of strong parental opposition, goes to Oxford
University and later serves as a nurse in France. She and Denis meet in 1921
in famine-stricken Russia, and they form a friendship which, despite Ruth's
devotion to the memory of her dead lover, an American named Eugene
Meury, leads to marriage. The novel ends with Ruth's election as Labour
M. P. for the borough of Witnall in Staffordshire.
As its title fromthe marriage service indicates, Honourable Estate takes for
its main subject the women's revolution, and there is in fact not a single
feminist issue which Vera Brittain does not touch upon: education, sex,
economics, politics, and family life all come under scrutiny. In her analysis
of three marriages, those of Janet and Thomas Rutherston, Jessie and
Stephen Alleyndene, and Ruth and Denis Rutherston, she examines the
miseries caused by the old attitudes to women and foresees a future in which
both men and women will gain from a new acknowledgment of women's
rights.
The marriage of Janet and Thomas, depicted in painful detail, reveals the
failure in personal relationships which inevitably accompanies male domi?
nation. Thomas represents the entire range of male oppression as Brittain
saw it. Domineering and selfish, he believes that his wife's main duty is to
attend to his happiness; he tries to limit her activities to parish affairsunder
his control, and he deplores the suffragettemovement as an unwarranted
intrusion on the strictlymasculine world of politics. At the same time he
denies Janet any rights of privacy or possession: he reads her diaries, he
manages her small private income, and he even refuses to allow her to select
her own doctor. Finally, as Janet realizes, he identifies "his sexual desires
with traditional morality" (p. 123), and maintains that a wife's natural
function, sanctified by God's approval, is to bear a large number of children.
Any rejection of these "normal duties as a woman" (p. 122) he interpretsas a
rebellion not just against the established social order but against the divine
will.
In this relationship Brittain was attacking the Victorian and post-Vic?
torian concept of the ideal marriage as one in which an older husband,
whose years give him wisdom and experience, guides a young wife, solving
her problems and easing her existence. It was an ideal commonly held and
widely represented in literature. In Delia Blanchflower(1915), for example?
by that most articulate opponent of feminism, Mrs. Humphry Ward?the
heroine, a former suffragette,eventually sees the error of her ways, re?
nounces politics, and settles down to marriage with a kind, loving husband,
older and wiser than herself. The reality behind this ideal, as Brittain
recognized only too well from the marriages of her parents and parents-in-
law, was that the husband dictated the wife's every thought, indulging his

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own whims and wishes and setting himself up as a Jehovah-like figure. In
such a marriage, according to Brittain's way of thought, the woman was little
more than a piece of property,as was symbolized by her wearing of a wedding
ring and her renunciation of her own name.5 Enough traces of this false ideal
remained in the 1920s and 1930s for Brittain to expose it in her satire
Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929) as well as in Honourable Estate,
Janet Rutherston's life reveals the devastating effectsof such a marriage
on an intelligent woman. Janet is hot-headed, pitifullyignorant yet gifted, a
woman who, given the opportunity, might have forged for herself a suc?
cessful career in politics, but who instead brings happiness to no one. Not
only is Janet indifferent to her husband's work and interests, but she is
devoid of maternal affection. Before Denis's birth she records in her diary, "I
see nothing before me but the sacrifice and the pain and the added lasting
cares and the cruelty of it all. I suppose it sounds inhuman, but my great
hope now is that the child may not be born alive" (p. 27). The birth itself is
mismanaged because of an inept male doctor, and this experience, com?
bined with the trials of rearing a difficult,sickly child, leads Janet to resent
and hate her son. When she findsherselfpregnant again, she does her best to
bring about an abortion and admits in a letter to Gertrude, "For the past two
days [I] have been doing everything I could think of to prevent it going
further.I have done this deliberately, knowing it to be a sin. I am acting on
the assumption that I have a child and I am doing my best to destroy its life"
(p. 72). In an age when contraception was still a controversial issue and
motherhood was still widely regarded as the most natural goal for women,
the portrait was deliberately shocking. Janet's attitude and character indi?
cate the author's bitter rejection of the old sentimental myths which, by
sanctifying the maternal relationship, robbed many women of the means to
self-fulfillment,encouraged jealous possessiveness in mothers, and deprived
society of the valuable contributions which women might make to it.6
Brittain shows in Janet the plight of the woman at the turn of the century
who might rebel against conventional wifehood and motherhood but who
lacked the opportunity to find her identity in other roles. Given a typically
prudish upbringing, Janet is completely ignorant of sex and unprepared for
her youthful marriage. Frustrated in her wish for productive work, she
resents the husband and child who tie her down. Her struggle for self-
definition cannot succeed, and the final measure of her independence
proves to be a bare room in an East End slum. Yet Janet possesses, as Thomas
does not, a real moral sense. Because she devotes herself to a cause, she
hopes that her work will ultimately improve the lot of women and prevent
other disastrous marriages. Thus she is able to see beyond her own circum?
scribed world and identifynot only with the women of her own time but also
with future generations.

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 The marriage of Ruth's parents, Stephen and Jessie Alleyndene, although
not so openly hostile as that of the Rutherstons, is similarly loveless. Their
problems stem both from the contemporary attitude to women and fromthe
English class system. Jessie was governess to Stephen's sisters and married
Stephen to revenge herself on the upper-class family which she felt had
slighted her. When married, she accepts her role as wife and mother but,
like Janet, she feels the need for constructive action. Thus she is happiest
when running Dene Hall as a convalescent home for wounded officers.But
Stephen sees no reason for women to have either an education or a
profession, and he regards the home as the proper outlet for a woman's
energies and abilities. Typical of his age and class, he reveals his bias again as
he accepts without question the conventional double standards which
condemn "impurity" in women while condoning masculine indifference to
moral values. His powers of sympathy are consequently blunted, and an
occasion of human sufferingmay be to him no more than a "good joke about
a seduction or a bastard" (p. 257).
The counterbalance to these two marriages is seen in the relationship
between Denis and Ruth, for they consciously work to build a modern
marriage in which man and woman act as equals. Ruth (who retains her own
name after her marriage) belongs to the generation which can at last profit
fromthe strugglesof women like Janet, and with unwavering determination
she overcomes one by one the old stereotypes about women. She insists on
going to the university; she insists on contributing to the war effortby
nursing. When she falls in love, she rejects the view which restricts sex to
marriage and takes Eugene as a lover, a decision made easier by what she has
learned about birth control from a fellow nurse. After the war, with Denis's
active encouragement and support, she enters the male-dominated world of
politics. Eventually, despite tremendous odds, she becomes one of the first
women elected to Parliament.
Obviously in many ways an idealized version of the author herself, Ruth
depicts one of Brittain's most deeply held beliefs, the belief that a wife and
mother has the rightto work and forge a life forherself apart fromher family,
Brittain contended that woman's firstduty is to achieve self-realization,
whether that realization comes inside the home ?r outside it. If she is denied
such personal satisfaction, she can do no good to herself, to her family,or to
her society. Writing two years after her own marriage, Brittain declared:
"The truth is, of course, that women, like men, should shape their lives in
accordance with their nature and their gifts.... Society is best served when
each individual lives the life and does the work to which he or she is best
adapted."7 It was this conviction that had led Brittain in 1928 to write
Women's Work in Modern England, The book, developed from a series of
articles which firstappeared in The Outlook, is a survey of the employment

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opportunities then available to women, and it was intended as an encour?
agement to women in their search foremployment and at the same time as a
justification of their right and need to work.
The choice of a political career for Ruth clearly derives from Brittain's
personal interests and from common feminist ideals in an age when women
like Ellen Wilkinson, at that time Labour M.P. for Jarrow,were coming to
the fore in politics. But Ruth represents all types of working mothers. In the
1930s middle class women were just beginning to enter the work force. Ruth
stands for these women; she is the new woman, determined to remain
informed, alert, and independent, whatever her family obligations. In fact,
she succeeds as a wife and mother precisely because of her professional
accomplishments. Where Janet's frustrationsresulted in hostility and anti?
social behavior (her final act in her marriage was an attempt to burn down
her husband's church), Ruth's independence enables her to reach out to her
children and husband. With the assistance of the Infant Welfare Centre she
raises her delicate, premature babies and shows herself to be a concerned,
loving mother. But she refuses to stagnate, and she insists that no mother
can be interesting to her children if she has "struggled along in the kitchen
and the nursery, knowing nothing about economics or politics or the social
changes going on in the outside world" (p. 517).
Yet although Ruth's marriage suggests positive feminist themes, the last
scene of the novel is not Ruth's political victory but the memorial service for
Gertrude Campbell at Westminster Abbey. Here Ruth, brooding over the
dramatist's unhappy life, is able to place herself in a larger time perspective.
At this moment she is able to verbalize that sense of union with women
through the ages which has always been a part of the women's movement.
She sees that the sorrows of the previous generation of women made possible
her successes, and she hopes that her own achievements will similarly help
the next generation overcome the problems which will inevitably confront
it. Looking backward and forward, she feels not so much optimism as faith:

Eversince 1914,we'vepassedthrough a wholeseriesofsocialrevolutions.

Thereare
othersto comewhichI shallnotsee,forreasonandmercy willhavetofight
theirbattle
withpassionandinjusticeforever.Hatredandcruelty andperhapsevenwarwillcome
again,inmychildren'stimeandthetimeoftheirchildren;they're thedarkforcesfrom
ourbarbaricbeginnings whichare alwaysbeingconqueredand alwaysrisingagain
(p. 599).

In 1936 this was a deliberate and grim prophecy. The conclusion, then, as
Denis and Ruth leave the Abbey and walk out "into the clear wintry
sunshine of a London November" (p. 601), is ironic and symbolic rather
than blindly optimistic.

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 But Brittain's analysis of the status of women does not end with the
depiction of marriage. Defense of the unmarried woman, the "old maid,"
against centuries of denigration and merciless jokes had been a prime
concern for feminists since the beginnings of the suffragettemovement. In
Honourable Estate Brittain presents two examples of the cruelty of the
unmarried woman's position in a male-dominated society. One is Stephen's
sister, Edith, an embittered woman who has become malicious in her
unhappiness. The other is Gertrude Campbell, a woman of powerful intel?
lect who still cannot escape the restrictions placed upon her by her sex.
Despite her success, she must care forher querulous, invalid brother and is as
hampered by his demands as Janet is by Thomas's. The one real joy in
Gertrude's life comes from her passionate love for Janet, but even this
eventually brings furthersufferingbecause the two women cannot under?
stand or come to terms with the sexual nature of their attachment. Selfishly
jealous of Janet's political interests, Gertrude breaks off the friendship of
thirteen years and lives out the rest of her life as a lonely and deeply unhappy
woman.
This full discussion of feminism is enlarged by other themes concerning
the problems of the changing twentieth century. Chief among these is
socialism. For Ruth socialism is closely linked with feminism, and her first
intellectual crisis comes when, at the age of thirteen, she overhears Stephen
telling the storyof how his mother dismissed a pregnant cook named Agnes.
Agnes was turned out of the house while in labor, and her child was born
dead in a cab as she was being taken to the workhouse.8 Deeply moved by
this story,Ruth sees forthe firsttime the injustices perpetrated on women in
general and on the working classes in particular. Identifyingwith Agnes, she
comes to recognize the common bonds of humanity and eventually to throw
in her lot with the Labour Party. As the novel ends, she sees in the
destruction of Dene Hall a symbol of the passing of the old era and looks
hopefully to the future believing that, despite setbacks, human beings do
progress and grow in compassion and dignity.
Also connected with the feminist themes are the ideas about human
sufferingin the novel. For Brittain, personal immunity fromsufferingbrings
its own horrors because it deprives the individual of participation in the
common human experience. Ruth is freed from such immunity by the
deaths of Richard, her brother, and Eugene, which force her to share in the
wider mass sufferingsand to take action to express her grief.When Richard
is killed, she becomes a nurse in France; afterthe death of Eugene she works
for the Quakers among the diseased and starving Russian peasants. From
these experiences she gradually learns the truth of the old adage that
sufferingleads to wisdom. As she thinks of herself, of Gertrude and Janet,

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she realizes that understanding and reconciliation may spring fromhumilia?
tion and that regeneration may follow despair. Thus she concludes:

We shouldfeelthatanysorrow bearsitsowncompensation whichenlarges thescopeof

humanmercy. Someofus,perhaps,canneverreachourhonourable estate?thestateof
of trueunderstanding?until
maturity, we have wrestedstrength and dignityout of
humiliation
anddishonour. Thatmaybe whyChristpreferred thesocietyofpublicans
and sinners;he knewthatit'sonlythroughexperienceofsin thatwe acquirea real
knowledgeofthehumanheart,withall itswoesandproblems" (p. 598).

Her final hope is that suffering,especially the sufferingof women, will

ultimately help produce an advance in civilization. The idea clearly suggests
a philosophy both humanistic and religious. At this time Brittain was still
ostensibly an agnostic, but her exploration of this theme, along with many
citations from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, indicates the
direction in which she was moving.
Justafter the publication of Honourable Estate, Brittain accepted Canon
Dick Sheppard's invitation to become a sponsor forhis Peace Pledge Union.
The acceptance changed the course of her life. Ever since her firstconnec?
tion with the League of Nations Union she had worked for peace, but now,
as events in Europe became more ominous, her pacifism assumed a specifi?
cally Christian orientation. Furthermore, it separated her from the League
of Nations internationalists and the left-wingpoliticians who had hitherto
constituted her intellectual milieu. League internationalists, including her
husband, George Catlin, regarded war as justifiable as a last resort to
preserve democracy. And the vast majority of Labour politicians, although
pacifist in inclination, now favored military sanctions under the auspices of
the League as a means of collective security.9 In place of her formerties with
these groups Brittain now aligned herself with the absolute pacifists who
stood outside the mainstream of political and intellectual life. As a result,
she made pacifism the primarytheme of her writing, and when war came she
turned to a full scale defense of pacifist ideology.
Brittain connected pacifism with feminism since she felt that woman's
basic nature, both psychological and physiological, impels her to create and
preserve rather than destroy life. The male principle she generally associ?
ated with power, domination, and aggression, while the female she linked
with love, compassion, and forbearance. Brittain explained this association
most fully in some of her later works,10but that the idea was already present
in her mind at the time of Honourable Estate is indicated by Ruth's campaign
speech:

sheconcluded,"themovement
"Remember," againstwarandthemovement
forbetter
humanconditionsare bound up together,
and the modernwoman'smovementis

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 concerned withboth.Ifonlythewomenwhonowhavevoteson thesameterms as men
could realisewhatthe abolitionof warwouldmean to the wivesand mothersstill
enslavedbyintolerable theendofpoverty
livingconditions, and injusticewouldbe in
sight.Ifonlytheywouldworkforpeace as theirpredecessors workedfortheirown
weshouldhaveno moreofthemonstrous
liberation, follywhichthrowsawaya nation's
resourceson thedestructionofmankind!"(p. 566)

In thus connecting women with work for peace Brittain was, of course,
drawing on a long tradition among feminists. Sylvia Pankhurst and Em-
meline Pethick-Lawrence were both committed pacifists. Even Mrs. Pank?
hurst, though an eager supporter of the war effortduring the Great War, had
understood that war goes against basic female instincts.11 From Olive
Schreiner to writerssuch as Winifred Holtby, feminists had proclaimed the
need for peace and the part women can play in preventing international
aggression. However, although feminism is traditionally drawn to pacifism,
the two are not always compatible. The essence of militant feminism is a
belief in the dignity and independence of each individual. Christian paci?
fism,while it too affirmsthe worth of the individual, also stresses the other,
different,principle of self-denial and transcendence of the personal. As
Brittain became more firmlyentrenched in Quaker-inclined Anglicanism,
the basis of her philosophy shifted, and she began to emphasize the Chris?
tian values of self-abnegation and salvation through humiliation. As a
result, her concern forfeminism temporarily declined.
It is the principles of Christian pacifism which predominate in her next
novel, Account Rendered,written in 1943. Based on an actual murder trial to
which Brittain was summoned as a possible witness, the novel tells the story
of Francis Halkin. Ruth Alleyndene reappears in the novel in a subordinate
role. Francis, a Staffordshire paper manufacturer who had at one time
intended to be a musician, is charged in 1940 with the murder of his wife and
with attempted suicide, but he disclaims all recollection of the event. His
amnesia is finally shown to be the result of shell-shock experienced during
World War I, and he is declared guilty but insane. When he is sentenced to
Redhurst Asylum, his friends, including Ruth, continue to support him, and
eventually their effortsprocure his release. He then marries his former
secretary, Enid Clay, and shortly thereafter leaves England to work as au
ambulance driver in North Africa.
The novel's main intent is to study the psychology of a highly sensitive
mind forced to confront the barbarism of war. As a young man in World
War I Francis is desperately afraid, not so much of death as of the possibility
of failing when his courage is tested. His unconquered fears rise up again in
1940 with the prospect of German invasion and so lead to his tragedy. His
fate, then, is an indictment of war and the society which permits war. But

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Francis fulfills the hope that flashed through Ruth's mind at the end of
Honourable Estate, forultimately he is elevated through sufferingand humil?
iation. During the trial he seems to expiate "not only his own terrible though
perhaps unintentional act, but the guilt of those whose national policy had
made use of him to his undoing."12 Thus Ruth, watching the proceedings,
realizes that she is witnessing a type of crucifixion. In prison and in the
asylum Francis struggles to retain his identity and gain a new understanding
of himself and others. As a result, he is finallyreconciled both to his past and
to whatever the future holds in store for him. Gradually emerging from
despair, he acquires self-mastery, and his final triumph becomes a
resurrection.
In this context feminism has little relevance, and the female characters
are subordinated to the pacifist theme. Sally, Francis's firstwife, is a conven?
tional woman whose nervousness arouses in Francis a love which is essen?
tially protective. When war breaks out, Sally's distress prevents Francis from
expressing to her his own horror and mounting fear. Their marriage is an
unequal partnership, and its tragic end comes froma failure not in sympathy
but in communication and mutual understanding. Both partners lose by
attempting to conform to stereotyped male/female roles which go against
their natures.
Francis's second wife, Enid, is a deliberate contrast to Sally. Where Sally
is weak, she is strong; where Sally is afraid, she is fearless. Unswerving in her
love, she supports Francis during his incarceration not only by visiting him
but by working for him and managing his affairs. She proves her mental
courage when she stands by him throughout the scandal, and her physical
courage when she saves his documents afterthe factoryreceives a direct hit.
Nevertheless, the depiction of Enid shows an attitude to women rather
differentfrom that in Honourable Estate, Strong as she is, Enid finds her
happiness only in Francis and not in the world beyond. Prompted by Ruth,
she rejects the convention that the man must speak firstand asks Francis if
she may share his life. But she makes her offer in terms that would be
impossible for Ruth: "There are quite a number of ways in which a woman
can be of use to a man?even when she's his inferior... . But if you need
me?if you can use me in any way?please do" (p. 307). To the end she
remains convinced that she is not good enough for her husband. Signifi?
cantly, as Francis departs, her chief consolation is that she will bear his
child.
It remains for Ruth Alleyndene to represent the truly liberated woman.
As in Honourable Estate, she is an able politician, dedicated to improving
the lot of the deprived and the oppressed. However, Ruth's energies are now
directed to work for peace rather than the advance of socialism or women's

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rights. She is a sharp critic of the "so-called statesmen" whose policies have
led to war, and her bitterest words are directed at those "on both sides who
are responsible for starving children to death or annihilating great cities by
bombs, and care nothing for the holocaust of innocent human life or the
destruction of irreplaceable historic treasures" (p. 312). Clearly Ruth is again
the mouthpiece for Vera Brittain. Yet here she is the observer who inter?
prets the moral significance of events rather than an active participant in
them, and so she is subordinated to the more conventional figuresof Sally
and Enid.
Account Rendered, written when Brittain was under fire as a wartime
pacifist, comes to assume the nature of polemic. However, in Born 1925,
published in 1948, Brittain combined a consideration of pacifism with her
earlier feminist themes. The novel takes as its hero Robert Carbury, a
clergyman who, after winning the Victoria Cross in 1915, enters the
Church, convinced that violence and killing are never justifiable. Coming
to recognize the common brotherhood of men, he sees his killing of German
gunners as a crime against humanity, and he keeps a German helmet as a
symbol of his own formerviolence. As the years pass, he becomes a popular
and powerful preacher. Married to a famous actress and the father of two
children, he devotes himself to his work and initiates an organization
designed to fight against poverty, privilege, and war. Throughout the war
years he leads this peace movement, despite the ever-increasing demands it
makes upon him. He dies worn out by his effortsjust after celebrating the
thanksgiving service forpeace in May 1945. The model forRobert was Dick
Sheppard who had died in 1937, and Brittain acknowledged that the novel
was an attempt to show what might have happened to Sheppard if he had
lived through the war.13
Born J925 draws together the themes of the previous novels and presents
Brittain's last fictional analysis of the difficulties of married life and the
conflicts between the demands of family life and public service. The most
significant female characters are Robert's wife, Sylvia, and Carol Brinton,
the woman to whom Adrian, Robert's son, becomes engaged. Of the two,
Sylvia is the more complex character. Brittain remarked that although she
had intended Robert to be the tragic figure, Sylvia gradually assumed this
role because of her failure to recover from an early bereavement. Through?
out her marriage Sylvia remains emotionally paralyzed, unable to love either
her husband or her children. Detached fromher family,with Robert's active
encouragement, she concentrates on the theater, where she finds her only
satisfaction. In some ways her position is the reverse of Janet Rutherston's.
Where Janet was tied to a selfish husband and denied the chance of
constructive work, Sylvia is married to a man remarkable for his generosity,

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and at the same time she is free to pursue singlemindedly a rewarding career.
That career constitutes the only positive value in her life, and Sylvia's story
illustrates once more Brittain's oft-reiterated belief that women, like men,
need challenging work to give stability and consolation to their lives.14
As Denis and Ruth in Honourable Estate succeed where their parents
failed, so in Born J925 the young people are able to free themselves from the
problems of the older generation and face with confidence the new tasks
that lie ahead. Carol, somewhat like Ruth Alleyndene, represents the new
woman. When Adrian meets up with her in Germany afterthe war, she is a
journalist, very much aware of her responsibility to describe the ruined cities
she has seen and to urge the necessity of aid to war-devastated Europe. Her
only hesitation about marriage comes because she cannot relinquish a job
which is of vital importance in the post-war world. But Adrian, like Denis
Rutherston, has learned from his mother that marriage need not preclude a
woman's career. Together they look to the future,sure that their shared love
and shared ideals will enable them to avoid the emotional problems which
war and an oppressive society had created for Sylvia and Robert. They
represent, then, the emerging leaders who will construct out of the holo?
caust of war a new social order founded on more rational and humane
principles than the old one had been.
Brittain's attitude to feminism inevitably changed with the passage of
time. Her philosophy of humiliation and self-denial did not always sit well
with feminist ideas, and when it came to the fore in Account Rendered, it
produced more conventional ideas about women and simultaneously a
noticeable decrease in effective character portrayal. But the shiftof empha?
sis was not a permanent one. Certainly for the rest of her life Vera Brittain
supported the cause of pacifism and in her seventies was still participating in
CND demonstrations. Yet most of her later writing manifests her concern
forfeminism. Such works as Lady into Woman (1953), The Women at Oxford
(1960), Pethick'Lawrence (1963), Envoy Extraordinary: A Study of Vijaya
Lakshmi Pandit and Her Contribution to Modern India (1965), and Radclyffe
Hall (1968) all betoken, in various ways, her abiding interest in the women's
movement.
Like all serious thinkers, Vera Brittain approached political and so?
ciological issues from a moral perspective, and the value of her novels
springs from the honesty and clear-sightedness with which she probed the
moral problems underlying contemporary events. This is the source of both
their strengths and their weaknesses. Admittedly Vera Brittain is sometimes
more concerned with theories than with people. Her characters do not
always come to life, and too often they are mouthpieces for her personal
philosophies. But the preoccupation with ideas is also one of Brittain's

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strengths. Her novels are written with passionate conviction, and they
affirmher deep-felt faith in human progress and her belief that human
beings do grow in sympathy and understanding. This belief was one which
she firstformed as a history student at Oxford when she studied the great
nineteenth-century treaties, and neither the economic disasters of the
thirties nor the world war of the forties could obliterate it. A true intellec?
tual herself, she saw reason and intellect as the means by which human
beings can transcend sufferingand evil, put an end to injustice and oppres?
sion, and begin to establish a better order of life. Socialism, feminism, and
pacifism were in her view all ways by which human society can advance from
its primitive state to enlightenment. For her a recognition of women's rights
was not the least significant indication of the development of the human
spirit towards full civilization.

NOTES

lTestament ofYouth(London:Gollancz,1933),p. 538.

2Honourable Estate(London:Gollancz,1936),p. xiii.
3TheDarkTide(1923;rpt.New York:Macmillan,1936),p. 2.
^Testament ofExperience(London:Gollancz,1957),pp. 124-6.
5Theseviewson marriage areexpressed at lengthin Halcyon,Or theFutureofMonogamy
(London:KeganPaul, 1929),especially pp. 44-45 and 84-86; in TestamentofYouth, pp. 188,
651-58; and in "StrawsthatShow the Wind: The WifeBecomesa Person,"Manchester
Guardian,14 March1930,p. 8.
6See also Halcyon,p. 66; "What Does MotherhoodMean? The PossessiveInstinct,"
Manchester Guardian,4 July1928,p. 8; "Changesin Parents," ManchesterGuardian,24 July
1928,p. 8, "IsWifehoodan Occupation?" Manchester Guardian,9 April1929,p. 8.
7"MenWho WriteAboutWomen,"Manchester Guardian,4 November1927,p. 8.
8Thestory wasone whichVeraBrittain as a girlheardherownfather recount;see Ladyinto
Woman(NewYork:Macmillan,1953),p. 151.
9See TestamentofExperience,pp. 170-72,andPeterBrock,Twentieth CenturyPacifism (New
York:Van NostrandReinhold,1970),pp. 130-38.
10See,forexample,LadyintoWoman, pp. 10,200,205-06,211; andEnvoyExtraordinary: A
StudyofVijayaLakshmi PanditandherContribution toModern India(London:AllenandUnwin,
1965),pp. 14,116.
nSee Brittain'squotationof her wordsat the Old BaileyConspiracyTrial, Ladyinto
Woman,p. 199.
12Account Rendered (NewYork:Macmillan,1944),p. 194.
13Testament p. 187.
ofExperience,
14SeeLadyintoWoman,pp. 231-34; and On BeingAn Author(New York:Macmillan,
1948),p. 146.

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