Growing up, her only sibling, her brother Edward, nearly two years her junior, was her closest companion. . Although increasingly judged to be Brittains best and most important novel, Honourable Estate has not been republished in recent years and is not easy to obtain. For, like, In the Steps of John Bunyan: An Excursion into Puritan England, Envoy Extraordinary: A Study of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Her Contribution to Modern India, Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History, The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers. Loretta Stec, "Pacifism, Vera Brittain, and India". For instance, in a 1929 review (New Fiction: Pessimists and Optimists), she insisted that no one can preach the gospel of optimism more successfully than the novelist who, between the sober covers of the book, creeps unobtrusively into those households where the politician, the ecclesiastic or the teacher would hesitate to intrude. Vera Brittain is most widely known as the woman who immortalised a lost generation in her haunting autobiography of the Great War, 'Testament of Youth'. Despite the demands of her pacifist activism, in the later stages of World War II and in its immediate aftermath she managed to find time and energy to write her two final novels, Account Rendered (1944) and Born 1925: A Novel of Youth (1948). He had married Edith Bervon, daughter of a Welsh-born organist and choirmaster, in 1891. Her many fluent, trenchant letters during the first war, so far unpublished, similarly show the nature of her strongest literary talent: straightforward unmediated expression of observation and opinion. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. For enquiries, feedback or more information, please email. Originally titled Day of Judgment, Account Rendered (1944) fictionalizes this strange and tragic story which linked the First War with the Second, allowing Brittain to demonstrate clearly the destructive effect of war on mind and spirit. Vera Brittain | University of Oxford The only other genre in which she wrote during the war was lyric poetry, and her first major publication was Verses of a V.A.D. Vera Brittain was born in December 1893 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, as daughter of a paper manufacturer. This greatly affected her, says Shirley, and made her realise that the dying German soldier was little different to the dying British soldier they both call for their mother at the end.