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The fascinating letters between Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth) and Winifred Hotlby (South Riding) that tells the story of an extraordinary, important friendship that created a model for a new kind of independent woman, after the first World War. These fascinating letters between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby tell the story of an extraordinary friendship.

A literary relationship that began when the women met at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1919, it lasted until Winifred's early death at the age of thirty-seven. The letters, written from 1920 to 1935, kept them 'continuously together', and show us the life of two pioneers who wished to make their mark as writers and campaigners. Each encouraged and advised the other. However, there were periods when they were literary rivals. Winifred landed a book deal first; Vera produced an international bestseller with Testament of Youth; and the letters show them negotiating envy and self-doubt. It was at times an uneven relationship: Vera, more than four years older, was married and had two children during this period, while Winifred, a single woman with an adventurous spirit, travelled and made a wide range of friends. As the heroine of her novel South Riding says, 'I was born to be a spinster and by God, I'm going to spin!' Vera decisively influenced Winifred's passion for feminism and peace; 'You made me,' Winifred told her. In turn, Winifred, who took care of Vera's children and placated her husband, gave Vera crucial intellectual and emotional support, fiercely believing in her literary gifts.

A portrait of the inter-war years and a dramatic, touching and ultimately tragic story, the letters have the hallmarks of honest female friendship: not without friction and with its own delicate co-dependency, but life-changing for them both. Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she taught 19th and 20th 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 U.S. and U.K. 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 15-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. The fascinating letters between Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth) and Winifred Hotlby (South Riding) that tells the story of an extraordinary, important friendship that created a model for a new kind of independent woman, after the first World War.