This is the largest selection published so far of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby’s questing, intrepid letters, expertly and sensitively edited by wife-and-husband team Elaine and English Showalter. Reading them, what is most striking is how bold their experiment in living was – and how depressingly our concept of the family has narrowed since the 1920s.
When they met at Oxford in 1919, both women seemed destined to be unmarried. Brittain had lost her sweetheart in the war. Holtby had never really had one. Like many “surplus women”, they moved in together. Holtby was tall, blond and breezily down on her writing; in the first letter here she calls a story of hers “a loathsome thing; but I had to write it … but I think it should be burned.” Brittain was short, dark and anxious. When Holtby was published first, she wrote, shaken, “Almost I think of you as if you were a stranger; we are not equals any more.” She needed a lot of encouragement, which is may be one reason why she fell for the charms of political scientist Gordon Catlin, who first wrote to her as a fan of her prose.
