Books about female friendship are ubiquitous these days, but in Vera Brittain's day (1893-1970) it was all about noble male friendship (a.k.a. mateship here in Australia) while close female friendships were sometimes the subject of speculation and gossip. Just as Brittain's Testament of Youth (1933) was the first to step outside the male experience of WW1, so too was her story of her intimate but platonic friendship with a woman who meant the world to her. Testament of Friendship is poignant reading because Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) died aged only 37 from Bright's Disease, (now known as nephritis, i.e. kidney disease.)

Despite its tragic conclusion, the book is a lively account of two clever young women determined to do something useful in the world. They met at Oxford, where in the absence of men mostly at the front, they enjoyed comparative respect for women. Both had served in the war, Vera as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse and Winifred in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), an experience which she used in her writing, as seen in the Sensational Snippet I published last week. Although Brittain's pacifism cost her some respect during WW2 which was looming even as she wrote this tribute to her friend, Testament of Friendship documents how young women could be politically active as feminists, socialists and pacifists, and could take on significant roles in the issues of the day.

At the same time, the women shared a grief for all that had been lost in the devastation of that pointless war. Vera had lost her fiancé, her two close friends and her brother, while Winifred's 'love of her life' returned psychologically damaged and not capable of settling to anything. Oxford, they found on their return, was a changed place too. Chapter VI explains how it was inhabited by three incompatible groups engaged in a spiritual tug-of-war:

• The dons in their academic twilight, barely illumined by occasional visits from younger or more enterprising colleagues who had joined the Army or taken posts in Government offices. These senior members of the academic staff had waited out the war in discomfort, not because they were pacificists, but because the chaos of war threatened their decorous intellectual routine;


• The returning servicemen, back to finish their interrupted studies, impatient with the university's restrictions on their liberty after years of peril, independence and extreme responsibility. Ex-colonels and majors in their late twenties did not respect curfews to protect morality!


• The youthful contingent of schoolboys and schoolgirls who had spent the war in classrooms and on playing fields resented the transformation of Oxford by their disillusioned seniors. Even as the Treaty of Versailles was setting up the conditions for WW2, their aspirations were to build a new world. So battles raged in common rooms, debating societies and university magazines.

Of all that I have read about the aftermath of WW2, I had never come across this dissection of the ferment in universities!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/04/10/testament-of-friendship-1940-by-vera-brittai... ( )

As both Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Vera Brittain noted in her introduction and preface respectively, the recording of a friendship between women is rare. Both Heilbrun and Brittain cited the Biblical relationship between Ruth and Naomi as being one of the few female friendships not only documented but widely accepted. Brittain set out to record her sixteen year friendship with Winfred Holtby and produce a detailed biography of a woman who died too soon, "She seemed too vital and radiant a creature for death to touch" (p 1). Indeed. It is stunning to think what Holtby could have accomplished when you think she was writing poetry by the age of eight and by age eleven was published. [Okay, okay. So her mother paid to have the poems published.] She was the Charlotte Bronte of her time. On a personal note, I think women should celebrate their friendships more often. ( )

Testament of Friendship, nominally a sequel to Brittain's rightly acclaimed memoir Testament of Youth, is a biography of Brittain's closest friend. I was motivated to read it by the moving Youth, rather than by any deep knowledge of Holtby's life or works. I found a yellowing copy in Shoe Lane Library, London, and was pleasantly surprised. Many authors are remembered by their works while their motivations are relegated to a foreword. Brittain describes a selfless soul, and expresses remorse for having been one among many who presented distractions from the literary projects Holtby loved so dearly.

Relationships, as in Youth, are at the heart of Friendship. And so is the accompanying heartbreak. Holtby's vicarious ability to feel the pain of others is epitomised by her sorrow at the death of Brittain's brother Edward. Away from war, we inhabit a world where appendicitis, pneumonia and childbirth are liable to cut short lives in their mid-thirties. We are left to reconcile Holtby's success with her attachment to a childhood love who, due either to the mental anguish derived from the Great War or an inconstant temper, fails to live up to the conventional standards of a suitor.

The political situation between the two wars is briefly discussed. While Youth focuses on the link between feminism and pacifism, Friendship establishes a link between misogyny and racism. Promoting equal rights for the black population in South Africa is a long-term project for Holtby, one for which she makes many sacrifices. Thrifty in her own habits, she is generous with her time and money. She seeks advances on her literary works to fund her causes, for which she also devotes time through her travels, lectures and journalism.

Of course, there is an element of bias in a biography of one's best friend, but the primary material, spanning correspondence, publications and first-hand reports, lends some credence to the picture painted by Brittain. Characteristically, Holtby hides knowledge of her imminent demise from her closest friends. Her ambitious final novel, South Riding, was published six months after her death at 37 from Bright's disease. It is next on my reading list. ( )

A very interesting development of the writer Winifred Holtby's life and times. ( )

Testament of Friendship is a work of love, Vera Brittain's witness to the life of Winifred Holtby, the most important person in her life. The two met at Oxford after each had served her time in WWI. They lived together (platonically, we are assured) for most of the rest of WH's life even after VB married and had children. Briefly, WH divided her time between her desire to make an impact on poverty, for peace, and for better race relations and her desire to be a writer of lasting fiction. Her death at 37 of a kidney disease cut short a life of achievement in both areas.
VB is able to give a novelist's appreciation of WH's literary work and a friend's respect for her selfless devotion to the various causes and people who demanded her time and attention. Other critics have deplored the proportion of time that she spent away from her craft, but VB shows us a life well-lived. We see WH at Oxford, brilliant and struggling to learn to spell and organize her writing. We see WH in South Africa learning the desperation of black Africans as they fought to establish trade unions, balanced with the complacency and fear of their white countrymen. We see WH returned to England and enjoying her growing powers as a journalist and novelist. We see WH dealing with the aftermath of war in her childhood friend whom she loved but never married. We see the friend who was willing to drop her own work to minister to her family or her friends.
If I have a quarrel with the book, it is that VB writes prepositionally. We read "about" WH and what she was "like." Rarely, and almost always in her own words, we see the living woman spring from the page - warm, vital, humorous, sarcastic. I appreciate what VB accomplished and wish that she had been able to accomplish even more. This book is well worth the time of anybody who wants a look at women in England between the world wars or of anybody who loves the novels of Winifred Holtby. ( )