Testament of Experience by Vera Brittain

First published: 1957

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1925-1950

Locale: England and New York

Principal Personages:

• Vera Brittain, an English novelist, essayist, and political activist
• G. (George Edward Gordon Catlin), her husband, an English political scientist and politician
• Winifred Holtby, an English novelist, her close friend

Form and Content

Testament of Experience, the second volume of Vera Brittain’s autobiography, follows her Testament of Youth (1933) in attempting to trace the history of the generation that came of age in Britain at the time of World War I, through an account of her personal experiences and her responses to public events. The perspective is that of a widely traveled university-educated woman from an upper-middle-class background whose career as a literary journalist married to a political scientist active in the Labour Party enabled her to become acquainted with some of the most prominent public figures of her time, from Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists and Dick Sheppard of the Peace Pledge Union to President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jawaharlal Nehru. At the same time, living in London and elsewhere in the south of England during and after World War II, Brittain was exposed to the dangers and deprivations then undergone by Londoners of all socioeconomic classes.

Testament of Experience is a predominantly chronological account of Brittain’s life from the time of her marriage in 1925 to that of her return from a speaking tour of India in 1950, shortly before her silver wedding anniversary. Part 1 focuses on the period between the wars, emphasizing the rise of Nazism and Fascism on the public level and Brittain’s initial literary success on the personal; part 2 deals with World War II and Brittain’s much-maligned efforts in the peace movement; part 3 chronicles the early years of recovery and Brittain’s work for famine relief and Indian independence.

Brittain’s personal experiences, as she presents them, are always intertwined with the public events and larger movements of her time. Characteristically, she and her husband George Catlin, to whom she refers as “G.,” honeymooned in Vienna, the capital of a recently defeated and dismembered empire, and Budapest, where Brittain observed the full force of the aftermath of war. The initial year of Brittain’s marriage set the pattern for the quarter-century of their married life that is chronicled in the book. Stifled personally and professionally by the isolation of Ithaca, New York, where her husband accepted a professorship at Cornell University, Brittain returned alone after a year to London, where she shared a flat with her friend Winifred Holtby and began at once to have success in placing articles and reviews. The couple drifted toward a legal separation until they settled into a pattern in which they spent long periods of work-related travel apart but enjoyed a relationship that Brittain always characterizes as warm, loving, and supportive, and that produced two children and lasted until her death in 1970.

Testament of Experience chronicles Brittain’s literary successes, her lecture tours and other travels, her work for the Peace Pledge Union and later for the Bombing Restriction Committee and the Food Relief Campaign, the trials of the Blitz, the pain caused by the death of Winifred Holtby, and the difficulties of extended periods of separation from her husband as a result of their careers and from her children because of the war. It is a story of a woman whose strong antiwar beliefs brought her public opprobrium and personal satisfaction, and who looks back on a career of sometimes prominent and sometimes more obscure literary and political work with gratification.

Context

Vera Brittain’s story as recounted in Testament of Experience is significant in terms of women’s issues largely for the example she set as a woman who, in a social environment that was still largely hostile to independent women active in politics, let alone unorthodox politics, sought, as she put it, the right to combine “normal human relationships with mental and spiritual fulfillment.” Seeing herself early in her marriage sacrificing her literary career, which she viewed as a devotional crusade for humane values, to her husband’s academic and political pursuits, she boldly asserted her independence, and the two worked out a free but apparently successful relationship that enabled both equally to do the work that was important to them. Her personal experiences as a woman influenced the social and literary topics she promoted and developed; for example, her difficult first pregnancy impressed her with the inadequacy of maternity health care in Britain. By the time of publication in 1928 of her book Women’s Work in Modern England, Brittain had come to be thought of as an important writer on women’s issues, with her essays appearing in several major newspapers and journals. She was called as an “expert witness” in the case of the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

In addition to its account of the struggle to balance literary work and the demands of motherhood, Testament of Experience also portrays the ubiquitousness of gender discrimination even in the supposedly progressive works of left-of-center journalism; when The Nation merged with The New Statesman, Brittain’s column was one of very few regular features that were discontinued, another being the contributions of her friend Winifred Holtby. Yet Brittain became a truly prominent voice for the women’s movement with the publication of Testament of Youth, the great success of which on both sides of the Atlantic she considered an affirmation of the wisdom of her attempt to pursue the dual careers of mother and writer. The book’s best-seller status confirmed for her the sense that she had managed to express the gist of the experience of her generation of British women.

In Testament of Experience, Brittain depicts herself as a type of transitional figure in the modern movement for women’s rights, connecting her mother-in-law’s activism in the suffrage movement with the success of her daughter Shirley in national politics. If it is difficult to identify Brittain’s influences among later writers, it can be confidently asserted that along with Testament of Youth, this book offers an important example of a successful woman writer who, during some of the most troubled decades of the twentieth century, found ways to conduct a prominent literary and political career on her own terms.

Bibliography

Bailey, Hilary. Vera Brittain. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1987. Part of Penguin’s Lives of Modern Women series, this is the first biography of Brittain, and it ends in the middle of World War II. A popular rather than a scholarly biography, it draws heavily on Brittain’s works and is useful mainly for supplying the chronology of events that Testament of Experience itself sometimes obscures.

Brittain, Vera. Testament of Friendship: The Story of Winifred Holtby. London: Gollancz, 1940. Brittain’s biography of her friend Winifred Holtby presents a different perspective on many of the events described in Testament of Experience, from 1925 until Holtby’s death in 1935.

Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. London: Gollancz, 1933. The first volume of Brittain’s autobiography presents her life and its sociopolitical contexts from her birth until 1925. The greatest emphasis is placed on World War I and its personal effect on Brittain and her generation.

Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, et al., eds. Behind the Lines:Gender and the Two World Wars. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. In the company of a group of essays on the roles and perceptions of women in the two world wars, Lynne Layton’s essay “Vera Brittain’s Testament(s)” explores Brittain’s development from patriot to pacifist and feminist as a result of her wartime experiences. The essay offers a brief but insightful overview of Brittain’s views on war, gender, and sexuality.

Kennard, Jean E. Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989. Kennard discusses Brittain’s friendship with Holtby and assesses its impact on their writing and their political activities.