Remembering the Suffragette for Interwar Feminism: Vera Brittain’s Honourable Estate

Abstract

This article is concerned with Vera Brittain’s 1936 feminist historical novel, Honourable Estate, focusing on the novel’s efforts to represent a feminist past as it contemplates its present moment of ‘transition’. Brittain meets the difficult task of making sense of the present moment by juxtaposing two backward-looking literary forms—the feminist historical novel and the diary—which suggest two very different attitudes to temporality. The layering of these forms in Honorable Estate allows for a nuanced treatment of the new challenges and opportunities of the interwar period for modern women and creates a space for ambivalence.

Keywords:

• Vera Brittain
• interwar feminism
• historical novel
• diary form
• suffrage literature

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lise Shapiro Sanders and Carey Snyder for their excellent guidance and to the participants in their co-led MSA seminar in 2018, to Maria DiCenzo for her insights and for stimulating conversations, and to the anonymous reader for this special issue.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is not to say that movement fiction was without ambivalence, a point I’ve made in ‘Woolf and Suffrage’ (Green 2021).

2 The phrase ‘back to home and duty’ is Deirdre Beddoe’s (1989).

3 See DiCenzo for a discussion of essay collections as a part of the ‘retrospective literature’ of the interwar period (2014: 424).

4 I am grateful to Maria DiCenzo for sharing this review with me. It is worth noting as well that a significant portion of Brittain’s journalism, particularly her articles for the Manchester Guardian, took up the pressures of domestic life for women within the context of a socialist feminist frame.

5 As Thomas Davis shows in The Extinct Scene, the historical novel plays a significant role in late modernism.

6 I am grateful to Patricia Bredar for discussions of feminist historical work and for pointing me to this reference.

7 In addition to Wallace, see Radford (1999).

8 Jean Kennard writes of the ‘reconciliation’ to be found in Brittain’s Honourable Estate and in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1935) with ‘mothers or substitute mothers’ involving a ‘vindication of the mother’s life and work’ (1989: 162); Deborah Gorham writes that ‘Brittain succeeded in representing through fiction that optimism about feminism that informed both her feminist journalism in the 1920s and her own life experience’ (1996: 245). Laura Marcus (2010) associates interwar feminist historiography with teleological thought and faith in progress (save for Woolf’s experimental work which she sees as an exception).

9 DiCenzo quotes Ray Strachey who wrote in Our Freedom and its Results that ‘modern young women’ were ‘themselves the products of the women’s movement and the difficult and confusing conditions in which they live are partly due to the fact that it is in their generation that the change-over from the old to the new conception of the place of women in society is taking place’ (2014: 421–22).

10 Deborah Gorham argues that ‘Brittain’s main purpose was “writing her own life” not only in her works of autobiography, but also in her fiction and in her informal daily writing of diaries and letters’ (1996: 5). Linda Anderson shows that Brittain first meant to write a long novel about the war before deciding on the memoir form for Testament of Youth (1997: 185).