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

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. She returned freighted with tragic experience, having lost both her lover and her brother and tended the wounds of horribly injured soldiers close to the front. She disconcerted younger undergraduates with her fiercely competitive and forthright views combined with fragile looks and a general air of suppressed trauma. Holtby, five years her junior, had also interrupted her studies to serve as a nurse for a year, but, as a big, clumsy, friendly giant, popular throughout the college, she could not have been more different. After an initial stand off, the two tutorial partners – both reading history – became inseparable, with the giant taking the nervous wreck under her wing and then, quite quickly and for the rest of time, sitting at her feet.