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“... Soon after Vera Brittain returned to continue her interrupted studies at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1919, she began to avoid mirrors, believing that there was a dark shadow, like the beginnings of a beard, on her chin. A strikingly pretty woman with a concomitant interest in clothes she was thoughtfully given a college room containing five large mirrors: ‘I avoided it from breakfast till bedtime and if ever I had to go in to change my clothes or fetch a book, I pressed my hands desperately against my eyes lest five identical witches’ faces should suddenly stare at me from the cold remorseless mirrors ...”

“... of a minor classic of the critical portrait-of-England genre. And that flatmate, pretty, political Vera Brittain. And that busy, unconventional household: the two women – radical liberals, feminists – writing, talking and organising as they brought up Vera’s two children; the sensitive American academic (the ...”

“... tradition. Her authors are Dorothy Sayers, Margaret Kennedy, Muriel Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby. In Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership, Jean Kennard looks at their experiment in friendship as an idea of ‘the second self, someone close enough to be ...”

“... the book sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained’. It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel ...”

“... even as a child that her father was not the person who counted. That would be her mother: Vera Brittain. Brittain became a household name on both sides of the Atlantic in 1933, three years after Williams’s birth, with the publication of her war memoir, Testament of Youth. As the millions who have read that ...”

“... got lashings of Latin American braid and a naval brass band, bemusing the residents of Richmond. Vera Brittain in Holborn elicited a family reunion of Brittains, Catlins and Williamses. Eleanor Marx’s event, arranged by the Sydenham Society on 9 September, felt like a last hurrah for the elderly socialists gathered to salute a fallen heroine. ‘The ...”

“... When Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was published in 1933 it struck a deep chord among those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief ...”

“... who have derived their idea of what the war was like from Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque or Vera Brittain may be surprised, and even slightly shocked, by what they find in these pages. There is no bitterness towards those held responsible for the war, no sense of betrayal by the older generation, no shattering of dearly held illusions, no dwelling ...”

“... in 1893. For a long time this remained largely a women’s course and in The Women at Oxford Vera Brittain noted that English was commonly dismissed as ‘pink sunsets’. In the 1920s English freed itself from its dependent status as an element in the study of ‘the national culture’ and became an autonomous academic subject whose prestige was ...”

“... but it was essentially liberal and individualistic. It attracted younger feminists such as Vera Brittain, who was weary of the sex war and demanded only the ‘recognition of women as human beings’.Murray and Anderson had struggled for that too, but did so through a politics rooted in female community. Feminism remained a major force between the ...”

“... officers or comrades. But these letters rarely revealed the true circumstances of death. Vera Brittain, whose brother, Edward, was killed in 1918, and who had worked as a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment in France, knew exactly how soldiers died. In Testament of Youth (1933) she wrote sardonically of these consolatory letters: ‘The ...”

“... student, I read and acquired the obvious classics: Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse, Brittain, Fussell. But I had lots of other fads and hobbies going too: opera, Baroque painting, Kurosawa films, the Titanic, the Romanovs, trashy lesbian novels. Sometimes my preoccupations overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One ...”

“... hands at rendering the speech of those less fortunate than themselves. A mere corporal addressed Vera Brittain as she was seeing her children off to America: ‘I’m sending the wife and kid. She don’t want to go but I tells her ...’ And so on. Hilary Wayne of the ATS made the preposterous statement: ‘Before I joined up I took my voice for ...”

“... rate more than two lines in Overy’s index – of the Eugenics Society’s Charles Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw ...”

“... icon enthusiasts, turning to each other for heroic inspiration. For Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Vera Brittain, the ideal was Olive Schreiner, who in turn liked to imagine herself a second Mary Wollstonecraft (‘the greatest of all English women’). The young Juliet Mitchell, we are told, identified with Margaret Mead, while the influential critic and ...”