Vera Brittain
1893-1970. British writer.
Vera Brittain grew up in Macclesfield and Buxton and started an early career as a writer. She became an undergraduate at Oxford University and interrupted her studies to work as a nurse for the VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) during the Great War. Vera Brittain’s life as well as the lives of her brothers and boyfriends who were all at the Front were ruled by war. Poetry was her earliest published observation of the topic of war and was the only way of being in contact with the soldiers. Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Edmund Blunden are known from 1st World War Poetry but uncommonly Vera Brittain was writing as a female poet about feelings and experiences through war, picturing the pain of the loss of family members and friends but also using poetry to maintain contact. Her memoirs Testament of Youth gives an insight on how war changed not only the lives of the soldiers, their wives and families’ but also stole their happiness. Vera Brittain used her poetry in letters to stay in contact with the soldiers, to uphold the relationships and to let love develop to her boyfriends.
Sources:
Brittain, Vera. Because you Died. London: Virago Press, 2008.