On Saturday 15 November, you are invited to find out more about one of Somerville’s best-known early alumnae, Vera Brittain.
Best known for her ground-breaking First World War memoir, Testament of Youth, published in 1933, the feminist and pacifist campaigner Vera Brittain is one of the twentieth century’s most significant literary and political figures.
In her memoir, novels and journalism, Vera used her own ‘provincial young ladyhood’ in the fashionable Edwardian spa resort of Buxton between 1905 and 1915 to criticise the stifling impact of dull, small-minded towns on women’s ambitions. For the rest of her life, Vera regarded her provincial upbringing as a hindrance.
A new biography is an important corrective to Vera’s own rather one-sided portrayal. Drawing on her diaries, letters and prolific literary output, Testament of Lost Youth: The Early Life of Vera Brittain shows how this period helped shape the character and interests of an extraordinary and unusual woman.
For this ‘in conversation’ event, author Kathryn Ecclestone and Vera Brittain’s granddaughter Rebecca Williams discuss how Vera’s early life influenced her feminism, ideas about love, marriage and running a home, and her relationship with her daughter, the politician Shirley Williams.
Do join us at 2pm for this event, with the conversation and Q&A in the Margaret Thatcher Centre, followed by afternoon tea.
The talk is being held in conjunction with a mixed-media concert, chamber music with poetry, in the Jacquline du Pré Music Building at St Hilda’s in the evening of 15 November: Between the Sandhills and the Sea – A Tribute to Vera Brittain & Winifred Holtby. To find out more about this, and to book tickets, please click here.