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.
They didn’t meet as students so much as collide, Holtby having crashed into the study where they were both to have a tutorial – and Brittain did not care for her at first. But then, she’d long struggled to make college friendships, isolated by her age and war-worldliness. She had first gone up to Oxford in 1914, but left the following year to serve as a nurse, work that would bring her to see some of the worst injuries imaginable; her sweetheart, Roland Leighton, and her brother, Edward, were both killed in the war. Holtby, five years her junior, had also interrupted her degree to nurse, but she had served only on the war’s “fringes”, an experience she enjoyed; she suffered, moreover, no tragic personal losses.
They were inherently different, Brittain dark, small and serious, and Holtby blond, tall and gregarious. But their temperaments were also amplified by what they’d been through, and by what they each perceived themselves to be up against; Holtby was less of a feminist than Brittain at this point, for the simple reason that her alderman mother had encouraged her to go to Oxford (Brittain had applied under her own steam, against her parents’ wishes).
Somehow, though, they embarked on their passionate friendship: a falling in love, of a kind. After Oxford, they flatshared in Bloomsbury, and for the rest of Holtby’s life, they more often lived together than not, an arrangement that didn’t change even after Brittain married and had children; eventually, Holtby moved in with her and Catlin, taking over the childcare when they were away. She was happy to do this, for all that she was now a published novelist and a prolific journalist, but what amazes is that Brittain was so casual about her generosity, accepting it as her due.
It’s as if Holtby is a wife (according to the meaning of the word as it was then understood): a very supportive one, who’ll take any amount of criticism herself, but who never offers any back. Psychologically, it’s fascinating. Stella Benson, a novelist friend of Holtby’s, regarded Brittain as a bloodsucker, a verdict with which I find it hard to disagree, even if she did atone for this after Holtby’s death, pushing through the publication of South Riding and writing a (somewhat self-involved) tribute to her. If people can be divided, roughly speaking, into drains and radiators, then Brittain is the former, still complaining about her highly privileged lot even as her dearest pal struggles with the illness that will shortly kill her. Holtby, on the other hand, is the latter: warm, encouraging, ever-optimistic.
But this analogy only takes us so far. The faint whiff of sadomasochism hangs here. In a letter of 1921, Brittain prefaces some compliments she wants to relay to Holtby with the comment that Mrs Leighton (Roland’s mother) said she was “not in the least pretty”. She struggles to hide – and sometimes doesn’t even bother to try – her envy of Holtby’s talent; of the fact that, initially, her friend is to be published while her books are rejected. She has a painful, even cruel, idea of what she believes Holtby needs and deserves in life, and this does not (until she’s on her deathbed) involve the love of a man. Having lost her own virginity to Catlin, in 1925 she writes to say that for Holtby, once would be enough, sex-wise. Equally, when Holtby is in South Africa in 1926, and enjoying herself mightily, Brittain can only worry she’ll “come back quite different” (another way of saying that she fears losing the exclusivity of their friendship).
I found these letters completely fascinating. They contain no juicy literary gossip, and most are not especially well written. But the relationship at their centre is endlessly intriguing, and when these young women outline their burgeoning ideas about their careers, marriage, happiness and freedom, it’s touching and inspiring. Neither one is afraid of ambition. Can a man ever offer the same understanding to a woman as a member of her own sex? On this, at least, the two of them are equally certain. The answer must be no. Such obliviousness. Such incuriosity. As Brittain writes of her (mostly) kind and stimulating husband: “He never says: ‘Tell me some more!’”
• This article was amended on 6 December 2022 to clarify some details about Brittain’s nursing service during the war.
Between Friends: Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, edited by Elaine and English Showalter, is published by Virago (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
