Customer Reviews

Vera Brittain a Feminist Life (Studies in Gender and History)

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When Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life came out in 1996, Carolyn G. Heilbrun in The Women's Review of Books, praised it as a "fine, provocative, inspiriting biography". Susan Kingsley Kent, in the American Historical Review said: "Gorham has written an important life of Vera Brittain that scholars and students of the period will not want to miss. She has drawn a more complete and thus sympathetic portrait of this elusive figure than has existed to date, and her prodigious research fills many a gap left by her subject's own tellings."
Gorham's book is both scholarly and readable. It has been read with pleasure by general readers, and has been used as a text in several university courses in North America and in the U.K.

THis 'feminist life' doesnt have the depth or insight of the brilliant authorised biography of Vera Brittain by Berry and Bostridge (published by Northeastern University Press). Gorham hardly touches on Brittain's pacifism, and her book ends in 1940, thirty years before Brittain's death. For a very readable and authoritative biography of Vera Brittain, try Vera Brittain: A Life by Paul Berry (Vera Brittain's friend) and Mark Bostridge (a young biographer)

I have been studying Vera Brittain for my final year coursework and found the authorised life by Berry and Bostridge (1995) a good deal more authoritative, readable and enjoyable than Gorham's study. Gorham is inaccurate and weighed down by out of date theory. Susan Kingsley Kent clearly hadn't read the authorised biography when she recommended Ms Gorhams' book. After Testament of Youth itself, I would strongly urge readers interested in Brittain to buy the Bostridge-Berry biograhy.