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Lead book review

Who needed who most? The complex bond between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

Claudia FitzHerbert explores the complex bond between two remarkable writers in the interwar years

29 October 2022

9:00 AM

29 October 2022

9:00 AM

Between Friends: Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby edited by Elaine and English Showalter

Virago, pp.496, 25

These letters between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby cover 15 years of a remarkable friendship that began at Somerville College, Oxford in 1919 and ended only with Holtby’s premature death from kidney failure in 1935.

Brittain went up to Oxford in 1914, but left to serve as a nurse in the first world war.

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