The story of the friendship between Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain.
As Vera Brittain’s Life of her companion Winifred Holtby is republished, Mark Bostridge examines the friendship between two timeless writers.
"Although we didn’t exactly grow up together,” Vera Brittain once wrote of her relationship with fellow writer Winifred Holtby, “we grew mature together and that is the next best thing.”
For 16 years, until Holtby’s untimely death, at the age of 37, from kidney failure caused by Bright’s disease, the two women had enjoyed a close companionship. As friends they had been intimates. As writers they were the most decisive influences on each other’s work. It was a relationship, above all, that made significant contributions to the writing of two bestselling masterpieces, which have stood the test of time: Brittain’s memoir of the cataclysmic effect of the First World War on her generation, Testament of Youth, and Holtby’s South Riding, her novel about a Yorkshire community struggling in the grip of the Great Depression of the Thirties.
After Holtby’s death, Brittain memorialised their friendship in a biography of Winifred which, she hoped, would remind people “of the glowing, radiant generous, golden creature whom we have lost”. This friendship has achieved iconic status, as an example of an emotionally and intellectually supportive relationship between two women, of a kind rarely recorded in literature.
It’s soon to be portrayed on the big screen, in a film adaptation of Testament of Youth, produced by BBC Films, and Heyday Films, makers of Harry Potter. The concluding scenes of Juliette Towhidi’s screenplay provide what are in essence two happy endings: Vera Brittain’s marriage to the political scientist George Catlin, and the continuation of her working partnership with Winifred Holtby, who will be no less integral to the domestic equation of husband, wife, and wife’s best friend than Catlin is.
Yet Brittain and Holtby’s initial encounters as undergraduates at Somerville, Oxford, had been marked by undisguised hostility. “We did not, to begin with, like each other at all,” Brittain later admitted. Physically and temperamentally, they were total opposites. Brittain was small, dark and moody, while Holtby was tall, blonde and gregarious. At shared tutorials, Vera felt nothing but resentment towards Winifred’s vitality.
Vera had returned to Oxford in 1919 raw and scarred by the war, in which she had lost her fiancé, Roland Leighton, and only brother in action, and witnessed death and mutilation firsthand – having four years earlier gone to nurse – in London, Malta and France. She was bitter at what she regarded as the insensitivity of her younger Somerville contemporaries towards her war experience. They were irritated by her obsessive preoccupation with the war, in which most of them had been too young to serve. At a Somerville debate, Vera was invited by Winifred, as the secretary of the society, to propose the motion that “four years’ travel are a better education than four years at a university”. Winifred then delivered a witty indictment of Vera’s superiority towards those who had not shared her experiences.
Vera’s humiliation was deeply felt. But from Winifred’s subsequent recognition of Vera’s emotional fragility emerged a relationship that was to be mutually satisfying and beneficial. Winifred’s warmth and generosity, her need to be needed, which was such a strong component of her personality, would sustain Vera as she rebuilt her life and attempted to fulfil her literary ambitions. Vera, for her part, would help to mould Winifred’s future as a writer, as well as encouraging her interest in working for women’s rights.
After leaving Oxford in 1921, they set up home together in Bloomsbury, and later in Maida Vale. From here they published their debut novels, Winifred’s Anderby Wold and Vera’s The Dark Tide, unceremoniously burned in Oxford’s Cornmarket by Somervillians offended by its portrait of college life, as well as launching themselves as journalists and lecturers.
They saw themselves, in a sense, as part of the generation of “surplus women”, who, as a result of the deaths in the war of three-quarters of a million British men, might never find husbands. It always seemed unlikely, though, that Vera, conventionally pretty and keen to be her own test-case for her feminist theories that a woman could be married with children and have a successful career, would remain unattached for long, and in 1924 she accepted a proposal from a young academic, George Catlin. Winifred promised Catlin she would arrange “a quite neat and painless divorce” for herself from Vera. But after more than a year apart, during which Vera failed to make a satisfactory life for herself at her husband’s American university, Winifred joined the Brittain-Catlin household in London, subsequently becoming an honorary aunt to Vera’s two children.
Some of Winifred’s friends remained resentful of Vera’s dominant place in her life and the demands she made upon her. To the novelist Stella Benson, Vera was Winifred’s “bloodsucking friend”, while the critic St John Ervine advised Winifred to divorce Vera “citing Catlin as co-respondent”.
However, the working partnership remained firm. In 1933, when Vera was close to breakdown in the final stages of writing Testament of Youth, it was Winifred who acted as conciliator, stepping in to appease Catlin, who had raised stringent objections to his appearance in his wife’s autobiography. Vera played a similar role in the months following Winifred’s death in 1935, ensuring that South Riding was published to universal acclaim, in the face of opposition from Winifred’s mother, who feared the consequences of the book’s local government theme for her own position as an East Riding county councillor.
It was perhaps inevitable in the wake of Winifred’s early death that Vera should decide to write a biography of her. Testament of Friendship was published in 1940 and remains a vibrant portrait of Winifred by the person who probably knew her best, as well as a moving record of a literary friendship.
In one important respect, however, the book fails to do Winifred justice. She had always been a proud defender of the right of single women to lead fruitful, independent lives. Yet, Vera, always defensive about the question of Winifred’s sexuality and unsubstantiated rumours that the two women had had a lesbian relationship, created an unconvincing heterosexual love story for Testament of Friendship, uniting Winifred with Harry Pearson, her childhood sweetheart, in a deathbed happy ending.
In some ways, a truer testament to the Brittain-Holtby friendship is contained in their correspondence, housed at the new History Centre in Hull (the city which appears, thinly disguised, in Winifred’s fiction). In these letters, domestic trivia – the perennial middle-class problem of finding space in a tiny flat for a maid – jostle alongside more profound pronouncements.
Assessing the relative importance of husband and best friend, Vera assures Winifred that “You are more necessary to me because you further my work, whereas he merely makes me happy.” In lighter vein she remarks that “Much as I love my husband, I would not sacrifice one published article for a night of sexual passion.” Commenting on the obscenity charge brought against Radclyffe Hall in 1928 for The Well of Loneliness, Winifred remarks: “To love other women deeply is not pathological. To be unable to control one’s passions is.”
Was Winifred Holtby in love with Vera Brittain to the extent that she had to control her own passions? Vera was adamant that she and Winifred had not been lovers, and nothing in their letters suggests otherwise. On the other hand, no one reading them could fail to be touched by the protective tenderness that Winifred expresses for Vera, her “very small, very dear love”. Yet the correspondence also makes clear that beyond personal sentiment Winifred loved Vera for the values she embodied, and which she taught her to share: the rejection of war and a determination for the betterment of women’s lives.
As she lay dying in a London nursing home, Winifred acknowledged the twin characteristics of this remarkable friendship. “Whatever I may do,” she told Vera in one of their final conversations, “remember that I love you dearly… I’m immensely grateful to you – you’re the person who’s made me.”
* Testament of Friendship: the Story of Winifred Holtby by Vera Brittain is published by Virago Modern Classics at £12.99.