If female friendship can be highly intense, it’s also deeply mysterious, its ineffability almost always better described in novels than in nonfiction. For this reason, perhaps, I hadn’t expected to find certain of its extremities quite so effectively mapped in a new collection of letters by Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, writers who are relatively little read today, and perhaps thought rather dusty by some (Brittain, celebrated for Testament of Youth, her memoir of the first world war, is the better known of the two, though her name has certainly faded since the late 1970s, when Virago reissued that book, and the BBC adapted it for television). But there it is. This deceptively gentle volume somehow gets to the heart of the matter, which has to do not only with need and approval, confidence and competition, but also with (sorry to bring this up) the patriarchy. Where else, in a world that is so often against her, is a woman supposed to find solidarity but with a sympathetic, like-minded sister? And yet, how this situation also sets us against one another.
Between Friends, smoothly edited by Elaine and English Showalter, tells the story of a relationship that began at Somerville College, Oxford, where the two were undergraduates, and ended only with Holtby’s death from kidney failure in 1935, at the age of 37. The pair wrote to each other often, first during their university vacations, and later when they were separated by their travels and by Brittain’s marriage to a stuffy academic, Gordon Catlin, who was then working in the US. It was a correspondence to which they were in some sense addicted, unable fully to function without it; such back-and-forth was a means of sorting out their ideas about how proudly modern women like themselves should live and work. But there’s something else at play here, too: a balance of power that is forever subtly shifting, and which may be traced not just to the beginnings of their friendship, but beyond that, to their respective experiences in the war, and to their childhoods, Holtby’s in the Yorkshire Wolds (the inspiration for her novel South Riding) and Brittain’s in the genteel Derbyshire spa town of Buxton.
