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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
 
 
 
 

Listings for Author:  

Vera Brittain

  

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Vera Brittain : Testament of Youth

Satirday 2 September 1933: 'I am reading with extreme greed a book by Vera Britain [sic], called The Testament of Youth. Not that I much like her. A stringy metallic mind, with I suppose, the sort of taste I should dislike in real life. But her story, told in detail, without reserve, of the war, & how she lost lover & brother, & dabbled her hands in entrails [as nurse] [...] runs rapidly, vividly across my eyes. A very good book of its sort. The new sort, the hard anguished sort, that I could never write [comments further] [...] I give her credit for having lit up a long passage to me at least. I read & read & read & neglect Turgenev & Miss [Ivy] C[ompton]. Burnett.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf      Print: Book

  

Vera Brittain : The Dark Tide

'The note announced, a little defiantly, that the writer had read, "with the utmost pleasure," my novel "The Dark Tide", and asked me in return to accept "the enclosed" - which, it said, there was no necessity to acknowledge.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: anon      Print: Book

  

Vera Brittain : Testament of Youth

'Amid several warmly appreciative judgements came a frank note from St. John Ervine, who wrote that my book had entirely changed his opinion of me.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: St. John Ervine      Print: Book

  

Vera Brittain : Testament of Youth

'Yet the previous December, after reading my first nine chapters, G. had written to me at Halifax: "Your book, I think, is a very great, a very moving book...powerful, significant, important - for me it is oppressive also - to it I am an outsider, intruding, shamefaced, feeling very unworthy, painfully unworthy to the verge of tears."

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: George Catlin      Print: Book

  

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