[9] Contemporary writers have the important task of interpreting for their readers this present revolutionary and complex age which has no parallel in history. For this purpose above all, Brittain always championed the novel as the preeminent genre. Testament of Youth - Wikipedia Vera Brittain was an English writer, pacifist, and feminist. But the other thing, which was very important, was she felt a need to recreate the young men that she loved by writing about them so their lives would not be ended. These included not only Roland, but her younger brother Edward, and their friends Victor Richardson, another suitor, and Geoffrey Thurlow, who wanted to become a priest. During childhood the siblings formed a close relationship, protectively isolated as they were in their wealthy middle-class home, where they were tended by servants and a governess. From France Roland wrote Vera numerous letters discussing British society, the war, the purpose of scholarship and aesthetics, as well as their relationship, which she preserved in her diaries and later writings. She met the Anglican priest and pacifist Dick Sheppard at a peace rally where they both spoke, and she decided in 1937 to abandon the foundering League of Nations Union and join his vigorous new Peace Pledge Union. It must have been extraordinary watching her mother's story on screen. It had already been turned into a five-part serial by BBC2 in 1979, she says. But in 1935 disaster struck: first her father, then Winifred Holtby, died. . "Perhaps" poem,Vera Brittain, 1934,(abridged version below), This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford; McMaster University, Mills Memorial Library, The William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections. Its feminist main themewomens right to independence and self-fulfillmentis, however, damaged by her failure to disentangle it from the contradictory theme of self-sacrifice in the cause of duty.
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