After leaving university in 1921, Vera and Winifred lived together in a studio flat in Bloomsbury, London. Sharing a commitment to feminism and peace, they supported each other in their efforts to carve out careers as writers and campaigners.
For ambitious, well-educated middle-class women like Vera and Winifred, 1920s London was a vibrant, exciting place to begin a career. After war ended in 1918, many working-class women were pushed out of the labour market and back into the home or domestic service. Both sexes suffered mass unemployment in the late 1920s. In contrast, a university education and freedoms created by the war had transformed the lives of many talented, educated, highly ambitious middle-class women: Ruth Allendyne, Vera’s autobiographical character in her 1936 novel Honourable Estate, observed “at least this century, if [war] did smash the world for thousands of women, it has given them the compensation of work”. By 1921, there were women doctors, scientists, members of parliament, magistrates and lawyers.
Vera in the 1920s (SC)
Vera became a prolific journalist, writing articles for leading newspapers, the influential feminist journal Time and Tide and the left-leaning New Statesman. A recurring theme in Vera’s journalism of the 1920s was the moral imperative for women to contribute to public life, and not hide behind, or be trapped by the comforts of domesticity and stifling provincialism.
Her campaigning zeal was not confined to feminism. Vera also wrote extensively about international politics, galvanised by her tours with Winifred through war-ravaged Europe in 1922, and their observations of League of Nations activities in Geneva. They were committed members of the League of Nations Union, valuing its promise as a peacekeeping organization, and they quickly became popular speakers at its public meetings around Britain.
Vera’s first autobiographical novel, The Dark Tide, appeared in 1923, followed by a second autobiographical novel based on a thinly-disguised Buxton, Not Without Honour, in 1924.
After being impressed with Vera’s ‘Oxford story’ and, in particular, its protagonist Virginia Dennison (modelled, Vera said, on an ideal version of herself), George Gordon Catlin (1896-1979), a political scientist with feminist and socialist sympathies working in at Cornell University in America wrote to Vera. He had also studied at Oxford. After a short courtship, they married in London on 27th June 1925. The couple settled initially in Ithaca, New York but Vera resented the restrictions of living in the United States and being a ‘faculty wife’.
From 1926 until Winifred’s death in 1935, Vera and Gordon attempted a ‘semi-detached marriage’ in which they spent part of every year living apart and shared their London home with Winifred. In numerous articles and public talks, Vera championed this progressive arrangement as necessary for women to pursue their own careers on equal terms to their husbands. The Brittain- Catlins had two children: John Edward, born in December 1927, and Shirley Vivien, born in July 1930.
The publication in 1933 of Vera’s most important and lasting work, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900 – 1925, catapulted her into life as an international celebrity. Already an accomplished public speaker, Vera’s best-seller status led to huge demand for appearances, lectures, articles, and new books. In 1934 she went on the first of three successful but gruelling American lecture tours.
1933 publicity photograph (McM)
In July 1935, Vera made her first return to Buxton since she left in1915, to see her brother’s name on the war memorial. A month later, her seriously depressed father committed suicide. Further tragedy came in September that year when Winifred Holtby died from Bright’s disease. As Winifred’s literary executor, Vera arranged the publication of her final novel, South Riding (1937) whilst continuing to work on her next novel, an ambitious feminist saga that dramatised the recent history of the women’s movement. Honourable Estate was published in 1936 and Testament of Friendship, The Story of Winifred Holtby in 1940.
In the wake of the huge success of Testament of Youth, Vera was invited to speak at a vast peace rally in Dorchester, where she shared a platform with sponsors of the largest pacifist organisation in Britain, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and leading figures including Dick Sheppard and George Lansbury. Sheppard invited her to join the PPU as a sponsor and after reflecting on it for six months, Vera agreed.
Vera’s standpoint of ‘absolute pacifism’ came to the fore during the Second World War, when she began the series of Letters to Peacelovers. She believed that any war, for any purpose, against any enemy, is a crime against humanity. For the rest of her life, never wavered in her commitment, devoting extensive time and energy to committee work, speeches, and journalism in support of pacifism.
During the war, Vera worked as a fire warden during bombing raids on London and travelled around the country raising funds for the PPU’s food relief campaign. Her pacifist publications and courageous public speeches against the Allies’ policy of the saturation bombing of German cities generated great opprobrium from fellow writers and friends, political figures and members of her family. Interest in her work declined, especially in the United States where sales of Testament of Youth fell from ten to twenty thousand a year to between two and five thousand.
In Humiliation with Honour, published in 1942, Vera explored the humiliation she experienced and her realisation that it was a Christian commitment to ‘nothing other than a belief in the transcendence of love over power’. Despite finding it hard to come to terms with the deepening of ’my own sense of inferiority and consequent inertia due to long unpopularity’, Vera never wavered from her beliefs.
After her final novel, Account Rendered, in 1948, Vera continued to publish historical and biographical works. She became a significant figure in the British peace movement and campaigned against apartheid, colonialism and nuclear proliferation, and for Indian Independence. Her third memoir Testament of Experience was published to unfavourable reviews in 1957. John’s relationship with his mother deteriorated as he got older. He died in 1987, just after the publication of his autobiography Family Quartet. Shirley went on to become a Labour Cabinet minister, was one of the ‘Gang of Four’ rebels from the Labour Party who founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981, and became Baroness Williams of Crosby. She died in 2021.
In November 1966, Vera suffered a fall on her way to give a talk at St Martin-in-the-Fields, in Trafalgar Square. Following several years of illness, she died in a nursing home in Wimbledon on 29th March 1970. In accordance with her last wishes, her ashes were scattered over Edward’s grave at the cemetery of Granezza in Italy, in September 1970.