Born in
Newcastle-under-Lyme, England, Vera Brittain was the daughter of a well-to-do paper manufacturer, (Thomas) Arthur Brittain (1864–1935) and his wife, Edith Mary (Bervon) Brittain (1868–1948). Her father was a director of family-owned paper mills in
Hanley and
Cheddleton. Her mother was born in
Aberystwyth,
Wales, the daughter of an impoverished musician, John Inglis Bervon. When Brittain was 18 months old, her family moved to
Macclesfield,
Cheshire, and 10 years later, in 1905, they moved again, to the spa town of
Buxton in
Derbyshire. As Brittain was growing up, her only sibling, her brother,
Edward, nearly two years her junior, was her closest companion. From the age of 13, she attended boarding-school at St Monica's,
Kingswood, Surrey, where her mother's sister, Aunt Florence (Miss Bervon), was co-principal with Louise Heath-Jones, who had attended
Newnham College, Cambridge. After two years as a "provincial debutante", Brittain overcame her father's objections and went up to
Somerville College, Oxford in 1914 to read English Literature, taught by
Hilda Lorimer and others. By this time, war had broken out and Brittain had become close to
Roland Leighton, one of her brother's friends from
Uppingham School. Finding her Oxford studies increasingly an irrelevance as her male contemporaries volunteered for war, Brittain delayed her degree after one year in the summer of 1915 to work as a
Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse for much of the
First World War. She served initially at the
Devonshire Hospital in Buxton, and later in London, Malta and in France. While she was stationed close to the front at Etaples, her experience nursing German prisoners of war significantly influenced her journey towards internationalism and pacifism. Roland Leighton, who became her fiancé in August 1915, close friends
Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow, and finally her brother, Edward, were all killed in the war. Many of their letters to each other are reproduced in the book
Letters from a Lost Generation. In one letter, Leighton speaks for his generation of public-school volunteers when he writes that he feels the need to play an "active part" in the war. Returning to Oxford in 1919 to read history, Brittain found it difficult as "a war survivor" to adjust to life in postwar society. She met
Winifred Holtby at Somerville, and a close friendship developed. They both aspired to become established on the London literary scene, and shared various London flats after coming down from Oxford. Eventually Holtby would become part of the Brittain-Catlin household after Brittain's marriage. The bond lasted until Holtby's death from renal failure due to
glomerulonephritis in 1935. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville included
Dorothy L. Sayers,
Hilda Reid,
Margaret Kennedy and
Sylvia Thompson. In 1925, Brittain married
George Catlin, a
political scientist (1896–1979). Their son, John Brittain-Catlin (1927–1987), whose relationship with his mother steadily deteriorated as he got older, was an artist, painter, businessman and the author of the posthumously published autobiography
Family Quartet, which appeared in 1987. Their daughter, born 1930, was the former
Labour Cabinet Minister, later
Liberal Democrat peer,
Shirley Williams (1930–2021), one of the "
Gang of Four" rebels on the Social Democratic wing of the Labour Party who founded the
SDP in 1981. Like Brittain, George Catlin was raised Anglican, as his father was an Anglican clergyman, but unlike her, Catlin had converted to the
Catholic Church. Brittain's first published novel,
The Dark Tide (1923), created scandal as it caricatured dons at Oxford, especially at Somerville. In 1933, she published the work for which she became famous,
Testament of Youth, followed in 1940 by
Testament of Friendship— her tribute to and biography of
Winifred Holtby —and
Testament of Experience (1957), the continuation of her own story, which spanned the years between 1925 and 1950. Brittain based many of her novels on actual experiences and actual people. In this regard, her novel
Honourable Estate (1936) was autobiographical, dealing with her failed friendship with the novelist
Phyllis Bentley, her romantic feelings for her American publisher George Brett Jr, and her brother Edward's death in action on the Italian Front in 1918. Brittain's diaries from 1913 to 1917 were published in 1981 as
Chronicle of Youth. Some critics have argued that
Testament of Youth often differs markedly from Brittain's writings during the war, especially in respect of her attitudes towards the war, which were more conventional in 1914–18. In the 1920s, Brittain was a widely published journalist, in
Time and Tide and many other newspapers and journals. At this time, she also became a regular speaker on behalf of the
League of Nations Union, supporting the idea of collective security. However, in June 1936, in the wake of the bestsellerdom of
Testament of Youth on both sides of the Atlantic, she was invited to speak at a vast peace rally at
Maumbury Rings in
Dorchester, where she shared a platform with various pacifists, including sponsors of the
Peace Pledge Union, the largest pacifist organisation in Britain:
Dick Sheppard,
George Lansbury,
Laurence Housman and
Donald Soper. Afterwards, Sheppard invited her to join the
Peace Pledge Union as sponsor. Following six months' careful reflection, she replied in January 1937 to say she would. Later that year, Brittain also joined the
Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. Her newly found pacifism, increasingly Christian in inspiration, came to the fore during the
Second World War, when she began the series of
Letters to Peacelovers. Throughout the 1930s, she moved between liberal Christian and
secular humanist circles, and in 1935 gave a toast to the
Rationalist Press Association celebrating the "gradual weakening of the power of superstition". She was a practical pacifist in the sense that she helped the war effort by working as a
fire warden and by travelling around the country raising funds for the Peace Pledge Union's food relief campaign. She was vilified for speaking out against
saturation bombing of German cities through her 1944 booklet, published as
Seed of Chaos in Britain and as
Massacre by Bombing in the United States. In 1945, the
Nazis' Black Book of nearly 3,000 people to be immediately arrested in Britain after a
German invasion was shown to include her name. From the 1930s onwards, Brittain was a regular contributor to the pacifist magazine
Peace News. She eventually became a member of the magazine's editorial board and during the 1950s and 1960s was "writing articles against
apartheid and
colonialism and in favour of
nuclear disarmament". In November 1966, she suffered a fall in a badly-lit London street en route to a speaking engagement at St Martin-in-the-Fields. She attended the engagement, but afterwards found she had fractured her left arm and broken the little finger of her right hand. These injuries began a physical decline in which her mind became more confused and withdrawn. Around this time, the BBC interviewed her; when asked of her memories of Roland Leighton, she replied: "Who is Roland"? Brittain never fully got over the death in June 1918 of her beloved brother, Edward. She died in
Wimbledon on 29 March 1970, aged 76. Her will requested that her ashes be scattered on Edward's grave on the
Asiago Plateau in Italy – "...for nearly 50 years much of my heart has been in that Italian village cemetery"— and her daughter honoured this request in September 1970. Some of Brittain's ashes were buried in 1979 in the grave of her husband Sir George Catlin in the churchyard of St James the Great, at
Old Milverton in Warwickshire. Vera Brittain's archive was sold in 1971 to
McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. A further collection of papers, amassed during the writing of the authorised biography of Brittain, was donated to
Somerville College Library, Oxford, by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge. ==Posthumous tributes and evocations==