Vera Britten is an English writer, pacifist and feminist. The fame was brought to her by the autobiographical book "Covenants of Youth". The work, first published in 1933, was reprinted annually. In 1979, a film was made from the book. Throughout her life, Britten was known internationally as a successful journalist, poet, speaker, biographer and writer. Interest in her personality has grown steadily, especially among feminist critics.
Biography
Vera Britten was born in Staffordshire, Midlands, December 29, 1893. After childhood, in neighboring Maclesfield, she turned, as Vera herself wrote, into a “provincial young woman” in Buxton, the fashionable resort of Derbyshire. She was the eldest of two children of the prosperous businessman Thomas Britten and Edith Bervon, the daughter of an organist and choirmaster. The second was Brother Edward, almost two years younger than Vera.
As soon as she could hold the pen, Vera began to write. She made up stories for her younger brother. Until the age of eleven, she wrote five "novels", illustrated by her own drawings. Britten's desire to succeed resulted in five mature novels published between 1923 and 1948. She deliberately intended to write bestsellers, so she used traditional forms of writing without experimenting with more modern methods.
In her works, the writer Vera Britten relied on her own experience, characters and events from real life prevailed over the imagination. She tried to rely in her works on values ​​related to her social and political views. As Vera herself wrote, her political convictions and literary work are closely intertwined. She argued that the writer's vocation was to find ideas for changing society and eradicating evil.
When writing the book "Covenants of Youth", the author intentionally applied all the novelistic principles. As Vera herself said, she wanted to make her book - truthful, like a story, but fascinating, like a fairy tale.
Years of youth
As a young girl, Vera studied with the famous novelists D. Eliot and A. Bennett. One of the sisters of her mother and Louise Heath-Jones, one of her mother’s sisters, was the boarding school for girls of St. Monica, where her parents sent Vera. The latter was a teacher who sympathized with feminism and the work of suffragists. She introduced Britten to the feminist polemic of writer O. Schreiner, which influenced Vera's beliefs.
Her brother’s school friend, R. Leighton, with whom Vera was in love, presented her with Schreiner's novel “The History of an African Farm,” which for a long time became a reference book for the girl. The relationship between Vera and Roland began shortly before the First World War. The girl admired the intellectual and poetic abilities of the young man. His parents were successful novelists.
Determined to continue her education at the university, Vera Britten persuaded her parents to let her prepare for the entrance exam at Somerville (Women's College, Oxford). In the summer of 1914, a letter came to the girl that she received a scholarship to study English literature.
Years of the First World War
World War I began just a few weeks before Vera went to Oxford. Her brother Roland and their two friends, Richardson and Thurlow, left to serve. Vera also decided to leave Oxford and go to military service as a nurse. Roland died at the end of 1915, Richardson and Thurlow - in 1917, brother Edward - a few months before the end of the war.
Since 1913, Vera regularly kept a diary, until she returned to England in 1917. This diary, describing the personal feelings and public events that the girl experienced during the war, covered the period from 1913 to 1917, and was published in 1981 under the title "Testaments of Youth".
Vera Britten, on the basis of a second diary covering events between 1932 and 1845, wrote two autobiographical books, which were published respectively in 1986 and 1989: “Testaments of friendship” and “Testaments of experience”. The next volume of the Covenant of Time was never published.
Britten's literary achievement as a diarist was firmly entrenched behind her. Her piercing letters from World War I were published in 1998, Letters of the Lost Generation, and she also emphasizes her literary talent: the ability to express her thoughts and observations.
The only other genre in which Vera wrote during the war was lyric poetry, and the first major publication was the collection Verses of the VAD (1918). Here, her achievement is controversial, though commendable. But the most common opinion of critics is that her poems are ordinary and competent.
Literary debut
After the war, Vera Britten returned to Oxford, preferring to study modern history rather than English literature. After graduating from Oxford in 1921, Vera Britten and Winifred Holtby, with whom she became friends at the university, went to London. In 1923, the writer made her debut with the novel Dark Times.
Britten and Holtby, in addition to feminism, wrote on various topics, including international politics; for this reason they traveled in 1922 through war-torn Europe and watched the activities of the League of Nations in Geneva. As members of the League of Nations Union, they rated its activities as a peacekeeping organization, and quickly became popular speakers.
In the midst of this activity, Britten and Holtby completed their first novels, helping each other with advice and criticism. The Dark Times novel by Vera Britten was rejected by several publishers before Grant Richards published it in 1923. The novel caused controversial reviews, both positive and negative.
For this novel, Vera was threatened to attract slander, angry criticism came from Oxford. This was caused by an unflattering image in the novel of life at a female college, many characters were recognizable. Among the few who were delighted with Vera's novel was her future husband George Kathleen. A young political scientist from Oxford began to correspond with a young writer, and two years later convinced Vera to marry him.
However, the novel was edited and republished in 1935, and Vera Britten found the Oxford Novel interesting and enjoyable. Its main theme is the right of women to independence and self-realization. However, the author’s inability to get out of the controversial topic of self-sacrifice, duty is visible. As the romance ends, Virginia's long, idealistic speech praising self-sacrifice causes confusion, which Britten herself later acknowledged.
Other works
These two themes, women's right to independence and self-sacrifice, are also visible in Britten's second novel, Not Without Honors (1924). He combines feminist, socialist and pacifist themes, which also dominated Britten's previous novel, which she identified in her work as inextricably linked.
Britten spent 1925 in the USA, in 1926 she returned to England. For the next decade, Britten was a successful freelance journalist, but she still wanted to write a bestseller. The publication of the Covenant of Youth by Vera Britten in 1933, which became a bestseller, changed her life: as an international celebrity, Vera now constantly performed, lectured, wrote articles and new books.
In 1934, she worked hard. But in 1935 one misfortune after another broke into her life: first her father died, and then Winifred Holtby. Having recovered with difficulty from a double blow, she found consolation in work, as a literary agent of Holtby, Vera was engaged in publishing and editing her friend's books.
Honorary Title, a novel published in 1936, is Britten's most ambitious work. After the publication of this book, Britten was alarmed by the premonition of World War II and was forced to devote more time and energy to writing articles and giving speeches in peacekeeping. She met the Anglican priest and pacifist Dick Sheppard at a rally, and in 1937 refused the League of Nations and joined the new Peace Pledge Union.
In Russian, the book of Vera Britten's "Testaments of Youth" was published in 2014. A fragment of this novel is published on the Internet in free access. Reader reviews confirm that this work, one of the best in English literature, is a unique and concrete portrait of a young Englishwoman who survived the war years. The book is difficult to attribute to fiction, rather, it is a documentary thing that talks about the crushing loneliness and emotional devastation of the heroine.
Years of World War II
During World War II, Vera traveled to America with performances. At home, in England, she took an active part in the food aid campaign in the Peace Pledge Union, and also worked as a firefighter.
Vera opposed the bombing of German cities by the Allied forces. Britten was strongly criticized for her position. Vera Britten's name was listed in the 2000 Nazi Black Book, which was to be immediately arrested in Britain after the German invasion.
Britten died in Wimbledon on March 29, 1970 at the age of 76. In accordance with the wishes of the mother, her daughter Shirley, a prominent scientist, dispelled her ashes on the grave of her brother Edward, who died during the First World War in Italy. Faith's son John, an artist, wrote a book about his parents. The Britten children, as consultants, were also present at the filming of the film about their mother.