Between Friends

The letters between Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth, and Winifred Holtby, author of South Riding, tell the story of an extraordinary friendship

'Touching and inspiring' RACHEL COOKE, Observer

'Lively, perceptive' MIRANDA SEYMOUR, Literary Review

'A beautiful collection' DAISY DUNN, Sunday Times

'A moving unvarnished chronicle' Sarah Watling, Telegraph

From the time when they met at Somerville College, Oxford, until Winifred's early death at the age of thirty-seven, they wrote constantly, encouraging and advising each other, even through periods as literary rivals as they negotiated envy and self-doubt.

Vera decisively influenced Winifred's passion for feminism and peace and Winifred gave Vera crucial support, fiercely believing in her literary gifts. Their letters, written from 1920 to 1935, kept them 'continuously together'.

This volume offers a window on an intriguing relationship... [It] delivers Winifred Holtby back into Vera Brittain's ineluctable embrace -- Claudia FitzHerbert Spectator
The Showalters offer an astute and sympathetic reading of the two women's dynamic, and the result is a moving, unvarnished chronicle of intellectual comradeship -- Sarah Watling Telegraph
[A] lively, perceptive and immaculately edited selection from the extensive correspondence between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby... There are many stand-out moments in this engrossing correspondence... The Showalters have triumphantly succeeded in reminding us how fortunate Vera Brittain was to forge a friendship with such a joyous, clear-sighted and selfless individual -- Miranda Seymour Literary Review
A beautiful collection... The care with which the letters have been selected and introduced becomes increasingly clear as the pages roll on -- Daisy Dunn Sunday Times
I found these letters completely fascinating... the relationship at their centre is endlessly intriguing, and when these young women outline their burgeoning ideas about their careers, marriage, happiness and freedom, it's touching and inspiring -- Rachel Cooke Observer
Expertly and sensitively edited by Elaine and English Showalter... The authors' intense bond is wonderfully captured... what comes through is a true partnership of two women valiantly, imperfectly, trying to find new ways to live -- Samantha Ellis Guardian
Fascinatingly, these letters also overturn the sentimental clichés about their relationship The Oldie

Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature. She is the author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, and many other books on women writers, and has also written about literature, art and popular culture for newspapers and magazines in the US and UK. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

English Showalter is a professor emeritus of French literature at Rutgers University. He was an editor of the fifteen-volume Correspondance de Madame de Graffigny, published by the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford, and he still enjoys deciphering manuscript letters. He has also written a biography of Madame de Graffigny and books on the eighteenth-century French novel and on Camus.

They live in Washington DC.

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