Somerville students 1914 (SC).
Vera is fifth from the left on the second row from the back, the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers is first on the left in that row.
Vera was disappointed that Edward and Roland would not be joining her at the start of her first year in Oxford. Nonetheless, from the moment she arrived at Somerville in early October 1914, Vera loved the graceful red-brick Arts and Crafts manor house on Woodstock Road, with its gracious flower borders, huge wood-panelled dining room, and tranquil library with Delft tiled fireplaces, cushioned window seats and decorated plaster ceiling.
Eulogising about the loveliness of Oxford, Vera threw herself with customary enthusiasm into college life, staying up until the early hours at ‘merry & noisy’ cocoa parties gossiping about other students and tutors, and having philosophical and religious discussions.
When Vera went to Somerville, it was just 35 years old. In Testament of Youth, she described its third principal, Emily Penrose, as ‘the first genuine scholar among women principals’. Penrose had built up a highly trained tutorial staff of university women and planned for the eventual admission of women to full degree status which came in 1921.
During her first term, a sermon from the Bishop of Oxford endorsed Vera’s view that student life was a valid contribution to the war effort because those who could not take an active part in the war should keep up England’s standard of intellectual and moral life.
By April 1915, with Roland in France and Somerville College now a military hospital, Vera was ‘longing to begin’ nursing, telling Roland ‘the only way to stop suffering one’s self is by alleviating even if it is so only little and indirectly, the sufferings of this unhappy stricken world’. Vera decided to suspend her studies so that she could make a proper contribution to the war effort. In July 1915, she returned to live in Buxton and began training to be a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Devonshire Hospital.
In April 1919, Vera resumed her studies at Somerville College. Determined to understand how the world had crashed into war, she changed her course from English to Modern History. She shared tutorials with a fellow undergraduate, Winifred Holtby. The two went on to establish a productive and loving friendship.
Other students from Vera’s pre- and post-war years at Somerville who would become literary contemporaries included the novelists Dorothy L. Sayers, Hilda Reid, Margaret Kennedy and Sylvia Thompson. Vera made copious notes about her experiences of Oxford and the people she knew there after the First World War. These formed the basis for her first autobiographical novel, The Dark Tide, published in 1923.
In that novel and in Testament of Youth ten years later, Vera recognised she was one of the first generation of educated middle-class women to achieve the goals of 19th century feminists. The Edwardian era was a time of great social change. While it was still unusual for young middle-class women to choose university, especially those whose parents deemed them to have good marriage prospects, a combination of women’s suffrage campaigns and wider demands for universities to train a new professional middle-class had created new opportunities.
In 1921 Oxford awarded its first degrees to women. That year, hoping for first class degrees, Vera and Winifred were a little disappointed with their second class awards but, undaunted, embarked with great enthusiasm on a new life together in London.