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Berry Paul and Bostridge Mark. Vera Brittain: A

Life. London: Chatto and Windus; distributed by
Trafalgar Square, North Pomfret, Vt. 1996. Pp. ix,
581. \$35.00. ISBN 0-7011-2679-5.

Joyce Avrech Berkman

Albion / Volume 28 / Issue 04 / December 1996, pp 723 - 725

DOI: 10.2307/4052074, Published online: 11 July 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0095139000000491

How to cite this article:

Joyce Avrech Berkman (1996). Albion, 28, pp 723-725 doi:10.2307/4052074

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 Reviews of Books 723

increased by Russia's continued interference in Persia's internal affairs after 1907, despite
Grey's repeated remonstrances. The Foreign Office discovered that the successive and
allegedly pro-Entente foreign ministers, A. P. Izvolskii and S. D. Sazonov, could be as little
trusted as their predecessors. The problem was, as the Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Arthur
Nicolson, lamented in 1912, "that this understanding [with Russia] is of more vital interest
to us than it is to Russia" (p. 328). Nevertheless the association somehow held together until
war came in 1914, fortuitously at a time when Anglo-Russian relations in Persia and Central
Asia had reached another low point. Contrary to the opinion of Keith Wilson in The Policy
of the Entente (1985), Neilson argues that Britain did not go to war with Germany out of
fear of Russian's subsequent reaction if Britain remained neutral, but solely because the
British government was convinced that Germany would threaten Britain's very existence if
its armies defeated France and Russia.
This book contains a wealth of information about the perceptions of Russia by Britain's
elite in the Foreign Office and diplomatic service, in successive Cabinets, in the press, and
in contemporary popular novels. It is also a thorough examination of Anglo-Russian military
and diplomatic relations from 1894 to 1917, based on meticulous research in British archives
and secondary material. As such it will long remain the standard work on the subject.

King's College, London MICHAEL L. DOCKRILL

Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge. Vera Brittain: A Life. London: Chatto and Windus;
distributed by Trafalgar Square, North Pomfret, Vt. 1996. Pp. ix, 581. $35.00. ISBN
0-7011-2679-5.

At last, twenty five years after her death, Vera Brittain (1893-1970) has received two
splendid biographical treatments. Berry and Bostridge's study, thefirstfull-length biography
of Brittain, precedes by roughly six months Deborah Gorham's Vera Brittain: A Feminist
Life (1996). These two studies are in many ways complementary—Berry and Bostridge's
engagingly written traditional linear narrative and Gorham's trenchant analysis of the
feminist axis of Brittain's life until World War II. Scholars interested in Brittain's remarkable
life should read both of them.
That it should take so long for such biographies to appear is not surprising given the
magnitude of the Vera Brittain Archive. Housed in the William Ready Collections at the
McMaster University Library, the Brittain holdings include her voluminous journalism,
political tracts, fiction, biographies, autobiographies, and diaries, no less than 23,000 letters
addressed to her, carbon copies of 14,000 of letters she typed, and hundreds of personal
letters that she wrote by hand. Fortunately, Paul Berry, Brittain's close friend and Literary
Executor, and Mark Bostridge, a generation younger than Berry, were not daunted by the
herculean task before them.
Nor did the mysteries, complexities, and contradictions of Brittain's life deter them.
Crucially assisted by scores of library personnel, scholars, friends and family, and with the
decisive cooperation of Vera Brittain's daughter, Shirley Williams (now Baroness Williams
of Crosby), Berry and Bostridge persevered in rendering a fair and thorough account of one
of England's foremost social and political critics and reformers, a path breaking feminist,
pacifist, and internationalist. Drawn from such prodigious documentation, their biography's
abundant and vibrant detail assures its definitive status for years to come.
724 Albion

Berry and Bostridge are at their best when they close critical gaps in what was known of
Brittain's life, and when they untangle persistent confusions about her relationships with
family members, friends, and lovers. Thoughtfully balancing their attention to her personal
and public experience, they bring to the fore in a direct and neutral manner some of the prime
motifs of her life. Though theirs is an authorized biography, the authors do not skirt Brittain's
failings, and they identify core paradoxes that complicated Brittain's life.
Though sharply opposed to upper and middle class privilege, Brittain remained conven-
tional in many aspects of her behavior and beliefs. Despite the growth in her pacifist and
internationalist convictions, she was no less a patriot and took pride in her English (and,
though ignored by her biographers, in her Welsh) identity. Impressively poised, reserved,
and rational in outer demeanor, she revealed a passionate and volatile inner life in her
published and unpublished writing. Brittain was at once "a hard-headed realist" (p. 226) and
"essentially romantic by temperament" (p. 315). Ambitious for literary honor and political
success, she sacrificed both during World War II through her scorching and brave pacifist
attacks on Great Britain's war policies.
If paradoxes were the warp of Brittain's life, key consistencies deserving equal attention
comprised the woof. Berry and Bostridge note many, e.g. Brittain's attraction to heroic
religious and political dissenters and visionaries; her zeal for penetrating what she saw as
political, spiritual, and interpersonal facades; her determination in the face of formidable
obstacles to combine literary and political work with friendship, marriage, and family; her
struggle for personal autonomy; her espousal of self-determination for women and colonized
nations; her resolve that the wartime deaths of her fiance, brother and beloved friends served
to convey the horror of war and the urgency of international peace; her didactic use of fiction
to convert her readers into social critics and reformers.
The authors slight or neglect, however, other major features of the woof: Brittain's
religious and philosophical inquiry into the meaning of death and human suffering; her lively
empathy with powerless social groups throughout the world; her copfous quotations from
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) whose vision of the indivisibility of equality and freedom for
women, racial minorities, and colonized peoples served as Brittain's lodestar (the authors
omit mention of her efforts in planning in 1955 the Centenary of Schreiner's birth), her
identification as a pacifist as early as 1925, and her belief that psychological and moral vigor
demanded a dynamic interplay of mind, body, and emotions. Skimpily treated, too, is
Brittain's drive to self-represent, evident in her often brilliant and multiple forms of
autobiographical writing. Relatedly, Berry and Bostridge miss the significance of Brittain's
love of theater and ritual, her amateur acting experience, the pivotal presence of actresses
in her fiction, the allure of Roman Catholic service. (Brittain's correspondence indicates that
Berry and Bostridge mistakenly attribute her choice of a Catholic wedding simply to her
husband's preference).
In general, while rich in description and providing compelling interpretation of specific
episodes of Brittain's life, this biography is thin in analysis. Its scanty summaries of her
fiction and social reform writing do not do justice to the logical acuity of Brittain's mind,
her dazzling eloquence, and the depth and passion of her historical and sociological
understanding. The reader who seeks a study that connects Brittain's thought and activity
to current theory and/or historiography on women, feminism, and World War One, on the
nature of political and social reform during the interwar years, on autobiography, on issues
of national identity, and on mother/daughter attachment will be disappointed. Still, Berry
and Bostridge convey with vivid power how Brittain met repeated, wrenching losses of loved
 Reviews of Books 725

ones, as well as life challenges of her own and others' making, with rare acumen, fortitude,
and courage.

University of Massachusetts JOYCE AVRECH BERKMAN

Robert Fitzgerald. Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862-1969. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xix, 737. $150.00. ISBN 0-521-43512-9.

This is certainly big business history, weighing in at over 700 densely packed pages. Robert
Fitzgerald explicitly makes marketing the focus of his study, and there is no doubt that this
is the major strength of his analysis of this leading British confectionery firm. In order to
emphasize the central importance that he attaches to this aspect of business activity,
Fitzgerald feels it necessary to take the reader through a crash course on the nature of
marketing history and competitive industry, including some theoretical and methodological
issues, before he gets going on the main story. In the process, Fitzgerald usefully adds to the
growing evidence that runs counter to Alfred Chandler's stereotypical typology of family
firms and their associated management style. This theme is further developed in the main
body of the book.
This Quaker business emerged in the 1860s when Henry Isaac Rowntree purchased a
small cocoa, chocolate, and chicory firm from his former employers, and for the next thirty
years, although the business grew steadily, it was hardly a roaring success. From the 1890s
to the 1920s it experienced uneven expansion in conditions in which the traditional cocoa
market was giving way to the far more sophisticated confectionery market as real incomes
rose. Cadbury 's met the challenge more successfully than Rowntree and was the marginally
larger firm by the latter date, but by 1930 it had significantly overtaken Rowntree following
extensive mechanization and the highly successful marketing of new brands. Indeed, by
1930, Rowntree was teetering on the verge of financial collapse. The situation was saved by
George Harris, who had married into the Rowntree family and joined the firm in the 1920s.
He introduced a vigorous marketing policy, and, as a result, during the 1930s a number of
the company's brands became household names—Black Magic, Kit Kat, Aero, Dairy Box,
Smarties. Wartime brought major problems for the industry. Raw material supplies, in
particular, were acutely affected. Total production in 1945 was seventy-eight percent of its
1940 level. Rationing was removed in the early 1950s, and this ushered in a period of rapid
growth for the firm. During the 1960s, Rowntree established itself as a multi-national
company, though still not on a scale to match Nestle\ In 1969, Rowntree acquired the
well-known firm of Mackintosh, which was about one-third its size and whose best-known
brands included Quality Street and Rolo.
Fitzgerald's story virtually ends at this point, although he does provide a concluding sketch
that traces Rowntree's continuing international ambitions, its near disastrous loss in the
cocoa futures market in 1973, and its acquisition by Nestle in 1988. This last event reduced
Rowntree to yet another victim of British casino capitalism.
Given such a large book, there is a general sense that the reader cannot ask for more, but
it can be suggested that the study would have been improved if the balance of treatment had
been a little different. For all the centrality of marketing, Fitzgerald implicitly tells us that
production and technology were far from being unimportant. Moreover, this point is borne
out by the discussion of Cadbury's success in the 1920s. A more explicit account of technical
change and development would have clarified a number of issues. Likewise, it is unfortunate