Between Friends
The letters between Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth, and Winifred Holtby, author of South Riding, tell the story of an extraordinary friendship
'Touching and inspiring' RACHEL COOKE, Observer
'Lively, perceptive' MIRANDA SEYMOUR, Literary Review
'A beautiful collection' DAISY DUNN, Sunday Times
'A moving unvarnished chronicle' Sarah Watling, Telegraph
From the time when they met at Somerville College, Oxford, until Winifred's early death at the age of thirty-seven, they wrote constantly, encouraging and advising each other, even through periods as literary rivals as they negotiated envy and self-doubt.
Vera decisively influenced Winifred's passion for feminism and peace and Winifred gave Vera crucial support, fiercely believing in her literary gifts. Their letters, written from 1920 to 1935, kept them 'continuously together'.
Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature. She is the author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, and many other books on women writers, and has also written about literature, art and popular culture for newspapers and magazines in the US and UK. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
English Showalter is a professor emeritus of French literature at Rutgers University. He was an editor of the fifteen-volume Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny, published by the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford, and he still enjoys deciphering manuscript letters. He has also written a biography of Madame de Graffigny and books on the eighteenth-century French novel and on Camus.
They live in Washington DC.