Testament of Friendship – Vera Brittain

Testament of Friendship sits between Vera Brittain’s other two Testaments – of Youth, and of Experience – and was read to complete the trilogy as part of my ‘book-et list’.

This volume differs from the other two by charting not her own life but that of her dear friend Winifred Holtby, who died prematurely in 1935 aged thirty-seven. Holtby is best known now as the author of South Riding, a novel completed the year she died, which paints a vivid picture of the people and landscape of the part of Yorkshire she came from and knew well.

But, as the biography makes clear, there was much more to her than that. She went up to Oxford shortly after the First World War and there met the like-minded Vera Brittain. Their experiences of the war, and the losses sustained, fuelled their passion for peace and reconciliation. Social justice was another driver and, now based in London, they found voice for their causes in their journalism, politics, and public speaking.

Following a visit to South Africa, Winifred Holtby found an additional cause to champion, becoming a life-long campaigner against segregation and subjugation of the native races.

Brittain’s admiration for Holtby shines through. Her only criticism of her friend is her willingness to be put upon, to help others, to lend support to causes, to accept responsibilities, that all conspired to limit her creative writing. She was also bedevilled with an unrequited love for a man she could not get over.

The contemporaneous account of the lives, struggles, and successes of aspiring female writers in the 1920s and 1930s is interesting, as are the insights into early feminism and the beginnings of the anti-apartheid movement. Underlying it all is the rarely told account of feminine friendship between equals, both trying to juggle a professional career with family responsibilities (children in Brittain’s case and for Holtby aging relatives back in Yorkshire).

Brittain tells it articulately with tenderness and such objectivity as possible given the closeness of their friendship.