Controversial writer who was pacifist and feminist, Miss Vera Brittain, in private life Mrs. G.E.G. Catlin, died yesterday.
Author, journalist, and public speaker, her works excited a good deal of controversy in her middle years. This was not only because she vehemently advocated controversial causes, such as feminism and pacifism, but also because she made great use of personal experience in her novels as well as in journalism and autobiography, so that the former frequently turned into what used to be called romans a clef, and acquaintances of hers, recognizing themselves or their friends under thinly-veiled disguises, were occasionally resentful of what they felt to be misleading portraits. Miss Brittain herself attached much more importance (and rightly) to her autobiographical Testament of Youth, which had a large sale in its time, and to her public speaking and organizational work, than to her novels as such.
She was born at Newcastle-under-Lyme, the daughter of Thomas Arthur Brittain, a businessman who subsequently moved to Burton; and educated at St. Monica's School, Kingswood, Surrey. From her earliest years she "scribbled", completing, apparently, no less than five novels before she was eleven years old, so it is not surprising that she set her heart on a university career. She succeeded in gaining an exhibition at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1914, and spent a year there before the call of war service took her into the V.A.D. as a nurse. She served in London, France and Malta. In 1919 she returned to Somerville, where like some of the men who came to the university after years of war service, she found the gulf between the "veterans" and those fresh from school rather difficult to bridge; she obtained her degree, however, and on going down took to journalism. With her college friend Winifred Holtby, with whom she lived for a time, she played a part in organizations aiming at international understanding such as the League of Nations Union, and in movements for equality between the sexes; she was much interested in the early days of Lady Rhondda's Time and Tide. In 1925 she married George Catlin, a brilliant Oxford prizeman who shared her political views and had in the previous year been appointed to a chair of politics at Cornell University; she then paid her first visit to the United States, in which country she made several successful lecture tours later in her career.
Shortly after leaving Oxford she published two novels, The Dark Tide and Not Without Honour, which met with only a moderate reception. Success came with the autobiographical Testament of Youth, published in 1933. This came out at a time when the tide of war-disillusionment, of which All Quiet on the Western Front and Journey's End were the first signs, was still flowing fast. The book, a vivid and passionate personal record, was widely read and praised, though some thought it overstrained and others found it embarrassingly frank in the days when outspokenness was not entirely de rigueur. This was her high watermark as a writer, though she published a good few other books, including three novels Testament of Friendship (1940) which was a portrait of Winifred Holtby, Testament of Experience (1957), a sketch of Lord Pethick-Lawrence (1963), and several books of historical and other essays with a strongly feminist and pacifist flavour. In 1968 she published Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity?
She was an honorary D. Litt, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; but in her later years, though she did not cease to write she gave the impression that her heart was more in lecturing.
She had one son and one daughter; the daughter, Mrs Shirley Williams, entered Parliament in 1964 as M.P. for Hitching.
