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Vera Mary Brittain (29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English writer, feminist, and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir ''Testament of Youth'' recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. ==Life and work== Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brittain was the daughter of a well-to-do family who owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton. She was the daughter of paper manufacturer Thomas Arthur Brittain (1864-1935) and his wife, Edith Bervon Brittain (1868-1948). She had an uneventful childhood with her only brother her closest companion. At eighteen months, her family moved to Macclesfield, Cheshire, and when she was eleven they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire. From the age of thirteen, she attended boarding school at St Monica's, Kingswood, Surrey where her aunt was the principal. After overcoming her father's initial objections, she studied English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, delaying her degree after one year in the summer of 1915 to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse for much of the First World War, initially in Buxton and later in London, Malta and France. Her fiancé Roland Leighton, close friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, and her brother Edward Brittain were all killed during the war. Their letters to each other are documented in the book ''Letters from a Lost Generation''. Returning to Oxford after the war to read History, Brittain found it difficult to adjust to life among the postwar generation. It was at this time that she met Winifred Holtby, and a close friendship developed, with both aspiring to become established on the London literary scene. The bond lasted until Holtby's death from renal failure in 1935. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville College included Dorothy L. Sayers, Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy, and Sylvia Thompson. In 1925, Brittain married George Catlin, a political scientist and philosopher. Their son, John Brittain-Catlin (1927–1987), with whom Vera had a difficult relationship, was an artist, painter, businessman, and the author of the autobiography ''Family Quartet'', which appeared in 1987. Their daughter, born in 1930, is the former Labour Cabinet Minister, now Liberal Democrat peer, Shirley Williams. Brittain's first published novel, ''The Dark Tide'' (1923), met with limited success. It was not until 1933 that she published the work for which she became most famous, ''Testament of Youth'', which was followed by the sequels ''Testament of Friendship'' (1940) – her tribute to and biography of Winifred Holtby – and ''Testament of Experience'' (1957), the continuation of her own story, which spanned the years between 1925 and 1950. Vera Brittain wrote from the heart, and she based many of her novels on actual experiences and actual people. In this regard, her novel ''Honourable Estate'' (1936) was in part more of a memoir. It is seen by some as a means of Brittain coming to terms with the profound trauma of her war years through the medium of her writing. Brittain's diaries from 1913–17 were published in 1981 in ''Chronicle of Youth''. In the 1920s, she became a regular speaker on behalf of the League of Nations Union, but in June 1936 she was invited to speak at a peace rally in Dorchester, where she shared a platform with Dick Sheppard, George Lansbury, Laurence Housman, and Donald Soper. Afterwards Sheppard invited her to join the Peace Pledge Union. Following six months' careful reflection, she replied in January 1937 to say she would. Later that year, Brittain also joined the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. Her newly found pacifism came to the fore during World War II, when she began the series of ''Letters to Peacelovers''. She was a practical pacifist in the sense that she helped the war effort by working as a fire warden and by travelling around the country raising funds for the Peace Pledge Union's food relief campaign. She was vilified for speaking out against saturation bombing of German cities through her 1944 booklet ''Massacre by Bombing''. Her principled pacifist position was vindicated somewhat when, in 1945, the Nazis' Black Book of nearly 3,000 people to be immediately arrested in Britain after a German invasion was shown to include her name.〔Berry, Paul and Bostridge,Mark, ''Vera Brittain: A Life'', 1995, ISBN 0-7011-2679-5 (p. 445).〕 From the 1930s onward, Brittain was a regular contributor to the pacifist magazine ''Peace News''. She eventually became a member of the magazine's editorial board and during the 1950s and 1960s was "writing articles against apartheid and colonialism and in favour of nuclear disarmament".〔Loretta Stec, "Pacifism, Vera Brittain, and India". ''Peace Review'' , vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 237–44, 2001.〕 In November 1966, she suffered a fall in a badly lit London street while on the way to a speaking engagement. She fulfilled the engagement, but afterwards found she had suffered a fractured left arm and broken little finger of her right hand. These injuries began a physical decline in which her mind became more confused and withdrawn.〔Paul Berry in the foreword to ''Testament of Experience'', 1980 Virago edition.〕 Vera Brittain never fully got over the death in June 1918 of her beloved brother, Edward. She died in Wimbledon on 29 March 1970, aged 76. Her will requested that her ashes be scattered on Edward's grave on the Asiago Plateau in Italy – "...for nearly 50 years much of my heart has been in that Italian village cemetery"〔Berry and Bostridge, ''Vera Brittain: A Life'', 1995 (p. 523)〕— and her daughter honoured this request in September 1970. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Vera Brittain」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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