Category: Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

The Stuff of Legend

Published on by emmaclairesweeney2 Comments

It was a question that prompted us to launch Something Rhymed, a question that eluded easy answers: why have so many female writer friends, unlike their male counterparts, failed to make legends of each other?

We wondered whether women had traditionally conducted their relationships privately while men had more opportunities to promote each other in public. Coleridge, for instance, had the freedom to up sticks to the Lakes where he could collaborate with Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads. At around the same time, Jane Austen’s abode was entirely at the whim of her family and she still felt she had to publish anonymously.

However, closer investigation showed us that women too have long been attempting to make legends of each other. After all, Charlotte Brontë travelled cross country to stay with Elizabeth Gaskell (a pair we’re sure to profile since so many of you have suggested them), and after Brontë’s early death Gaskell published the first biography of her friend.

This month’s pair, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, emerged very much from this trailblazing tradition, embracing mutual publicity from the start: debating at the Oxford Union, campaigning for their shared social and political causes, publishing prolific amounts of journalism. Indeed, the pair became so entangled in people’s minds that Winifred Holtby was once introduced at a meeting as ‘Miss Vera Holtby’! It is fitting, therefore, that after Holtby’s early death, Brittain edited and promoted her friend’s final novel and then memorialised their relationship in Testament of Friendship.

Question Mark

We took rather longer to expose our friendship to public scrutiny. For the first decade since our initial meeting, we critiqued each other’s work in the privacy of our own homes, and we published entirely separately. But ever since The Times commissioned us to write about female writing friendship, we’ve become far less publicity shy, looking to Brittain and Holtby as our role models.

Our attempts to follow in their footsteps has brought us many unexpected and joyful connections, from drinking Prosecco in Kiliney Castle with writer pals Anne Enright and Lia Mills to gaining our first hits on this site from Korea and Kyrgyzstan. The generous coverage Something Rhymed has received from Slightly Bookist and Women Writers, Women, Books has resulted in particularly strong contingents of blog followers from Canada and the USA, and tweets from the likes of the New York Public Library. Just recently, we received some especially interesting suggestions from our new North American friends, who alerted us to the epistolary relationship between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the friendship that A.S. Byatt managed to forge with her literary heroine, Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch also came up on the back of a connection we’ve forged closer to home. When the Yorkshire Post picked up on Holtby’s (and Emily’s) Yorkshire connections, one of their reader’s got in touch to tell us about Murdoch and the philosopher Philippa Foot, whose extraordinary friendship eventually survived a sexual interlude and even a massive bust-up.

Mercifully, our friendship has not only survived but thrived since we made the decision to follow the example of Brittain and Holtby. But our investigation into female writers and publicity has not yet produced an answer to our initial question. Instead, the question itself has changed. So now we’ve begun to ask ourselves this: why do women’s attempts to make legends of each other tend to get written out of literary lore?

By the time we met, I felt as though I already knew her: Kadija ‘George’ Sesay and Dorothea Smartt

Published on by Emily Midorikawa1 Comment

Our April guest bloggers are poets Kadija ‘George’ Sesay and Dorothea Smartt. They’ve shared with us their conversation about their first impressions of each other…

Kadija George

 

Kadija
The first time I met Dorothea, she was a figment, yet a fixture of Centerprise, a community centre in East London, that housed a community publishing project. In 1995, I became the Black Literature Development Worker, a newly created post that replaced Dorothea’s role in the publishing project, which she ran with Bernadette Halpin. There wasn’t anything I could do that wasn’t compared to Dorothea!

Are you going to run workshops (like Dorothea)? Are you going to set up performance poetry evenings (like Dorothea)? Can you publish our poems in books (like Dorothea)?

Who was this Dorothea person I had to compete against?

In the meantime I took home the Word Up! Women’s Café anthology that Dorothea had edited, and realised why this woman was so missed by those she’d worked with. This was a classic anthology of women’s performance poetry in London, published in the mid-Nineties. There was nothing else like it.

DSafro byRT IMG_7860

Dorothea
I can’t remember when I first heard about Kadija. I had heard of her before I met her because she was working at Centerprise where I had worked, at one of the most enjoyable and rewarding jobs that I had had, up until that time.

Although I left Centerprise under a cloud I was glad to see there was someone taking up the reins. One of my main regrets was that I always felt I should have published more Black people. At the point when I left, we had our publishing resources removed so when she brought out Calabash, a newspaper for writers of African and Caribbean descent, I thought: oh good, she is getting around that, by putting out a resource in newspaper format.

Kadija
By the time I met Dorothea, I felt as though I already knew her – I can’t even remember the exact time, except I published one of her poems in my first anthology, Burning Words, Flaming Images for which she says, till this day, it is the only poem she has published that she has ever been paid for, so I’m proud of that.

Dorothea
I remember reading at the launch event for the book at Centerprise. I still have the photo of Jacob Ross, Bernardine Evaristo, Courttia Newland, Chris Abani… It could very well have been the first time we met in person.

Around that time, Kadija organised the first Writer’s Hotspot in The Gambia in 1996. When she asked me to go a second time to be one of the tutors, I couldn’t believe it. I went again and shadowed Kadija.

She pointed me out and said, ‘On the next trip, she’s the Boss Lady.’ It gave me a lot of confidence that she selected me.

Kadija
I knew Dorothea had a good reputation so there was mutual respect on both sides.

Dorothea
And here was someone who liked travelling as well. I believed in Kadija and what she was doing. I knew that whatever she did was gonna get done!

Kadija ‘George’ Sesay is the publisher of SABLE LitMag. Her poetry collection Irki was published by Peepal Tree Press.

Dorothea Smartt’s third poetry collection Reader I married him and other strange goings on will be published by in 2014.

They are currently co-directors of the Inscribe programme for professional development for writers of African and Asian descent, based at Peepal Tree Press.

The Elephant in the Room

Published on by emmaclairesweeney4 Comments
Emily visiting Emma Claire in Dublin four years after they first met
Emily visiting Emma Claire in Dublin four years after they first met

My friendship with Emily is founded on deep similarities – in tastes, and values, and goals – but it was a superficial difference that struck me first.

Emily is beautiful. It’s something anyone would notice about her. No wonder a Vidal Sassoon trainee was so keen for the chance to style her hair. When we’ve touched on our differences before, this has been for me the elephant in the room. Unlike Em, I am not the kind of woman that hairdressers stop on the street.

I distinctly remember the chopped style Emily sported back then, her blond highlights. The fairness of her hair was so striking against her olive skin that I looked at her during our first Japanese lesson, trying to discern her ethnicity. It seems so obvious to me now that she is half-English, half-Japanese that I find it absurd when people mistake us for sisters. Absurdly complimentary, too, that someone thinks I resemble Em.

It’s not that I’m plagued by poor self image. I rather enjoy my looks: my Celtic green eyes; my size three feet; my very English mousy hair. Emily’s beauty is simply a fact – something that, as her friend, I get to enjoy. I quickly came to value, for instance, that our shared love of fashion never slid into competition, that we would both just as likely order pie and chips as goat’s cheese salad.

But when we first met, before leaving for our teaching posts in Japan, a part of me must have assumed that someone as beautiful and trendy as Em would not want to be friends with me.

My most vivid memory of first meeting Em occurred just after our first Japanese lesson. A group of us were waiting for the lift when Emily mentioned her disappointment at being placed in Matsuyama – the capital of Ehime prefecture. She didn’t want to be out in the sticks. This amused me since Matsuyama has a population the size of Liverpool, and I surmised we might have little in common since I’d sought a job in a mountain village.

But I must also have sensed some promise of connection because I remember thinking: I’ll either find Emily too cool for school, or we’ll end up firm friends.

I’m not sure exactly how we went from that moment outside the lift to the strong foundations of friendship that we’d established just months later: gravitating outside during raucous parties; trading stories of the men we’d left behind; and, finally, sharing the writing we’d scribbled in secret. Em must have done the initial legwork; I would surely have been too scared of rejection.

Her honesty is one of the qualities I jotted in response to February’s challenge. It extends, at times, to making herself vulnerable: letting an old lover know that her feelings haven’t changed; leaving an unsatisfactory job; reaching out to a new friend. Her candour, which ensured that we did become firm friends, is a deeply beautiful quality, and one that I glimpsed very soon after my first impression of her lovely olive complexion and blond, cropped hair.

First Impressions: I liked her, right from the start

Published on by Emily Midorikawa4 Comments

Looking back on the early days with Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain would write in her memoir Testament of Friendship that ‘We did not, to begin with, like each other at all’. For my part at least, my first thoughts on Emma Claire couldn’t have been further from those words.

Em and I became friends when we were both working as English language teachers on the island of Shikoku, in rural Japan.

Travelling together in the Japan Alps in May 2002
Travelling together in the Japan Alps in May 2002

We’d gone there as participants on the JET Programme, a Japanese government initiative to place native English speakers in the nation’s schools, but we actually met at the pre-departure orientation in London in July 2001.

I vividly remember stepping outside in a break between sessions and spotting Emma Claire sitting on the grass. She was with a small group of new JETs, all of them swapping stories about the little they knew of the towns and villages to which they were headed.

Of all the people sitting on the lawn that day – most, like us, in their earlier twenties and lacking any previous teaching experience – my feeling was that Emma Claire was someone with whom I had something extra in common.

Why I should have thought this, and from the start, is a lot more difficult to understand.

These days, people take us to be so alike that we have sometimes been confused for sisters, but, other than the fact we were both short and from the north of England, I don’t think we can have appeared particularly similar back then.

We were dressed very differently from each other that day, and my hair, unlike Em’s that flowed freely down her back, was chopped and cut up with streaks of blonde – although this was largely the result of having been accosted in the street just weeks earlier by an enthusiastic trainee stylist from Vidal Sassoon.

OK, you might think, but what about our shared interests? Surely there we would have found common ground. But I don’t remember hitting on a mutual taste in music or films, and I’m not sure either of us thought to mention books or favourite authors. Certainly, we wouldn’t have said anything about wanting to be writers, since at that stage we hadn’t even properly admitted that secret to ourselves.

What I do recall is my sense of disappointment when I realised that, although we’d be living in the same prefecture, Emma Claire would be living a couple of hours away from my house.

Holtby and Brittain, thrown together in their Oxford college, must have had to go out of their way to avoid each other in that early period of distrust. In marked contrast, it was clear to me right away that if Em and I were going to become friends we’d each have to make a special effort.

That summer’s day all those years ago, now seems like such a key moment in our lives that it really is painful to imagine just what we’d have missed out on if one of us, or both of us, had decided that the effort wasn’t quite worth our while.

Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

Published on by Emily Midorikawa13 Comments
Testament of Friendship
Image used with the kind permission of Virago.

Since we began asking for recommendations of literary friends for Something Rhymed, one pair has dominated the replies: Vera Brittain, who penned the classic First World War memoir Testament of Youth and Winifred Holtby, the author of South Riding.

Both committed feminists, pacifists and socialists, it’s surprising perhaps that when they met as students at Oxford, these two initially disliked each other. After suffering what she took to be a humiliation by Holtby during a university debate, Brittain was keen to avoid her college mate – this frostiness only being repaired when Holtby called on Brittain, who’d been fighting a cold, with the unexpected gift of a bunch of grapes.

Once they’d got over their initial feelings of distrust, they realised that, despite outward differences – Holtby was tall, blonde and gregarious, whereas Brittain was small, dark and more reserved – they had a great deal in common. They bonded over their shared experiences of war service and mutual aims to make their way as writers.

After university, they decided to move in together, so that they could encourage each other in their ambitions.They also, famously, lived together in later years when Holtby joined the family home that Brittain established with her husband George Catlin, and Holtby became an aunt figure to the couple’s two children.

During their sixteen-year friendship, they continued to actively support each other’s careers. Despite the soar-away success of Brittain’s Testament of Youth, this was very much a friendship between equals. They often critiqued each other’s finished writings (although, interestingly to us, rarely work-in-progress) and helped to shape their thinking on important issues of the day through their conversations and letters.

We find these two particularly fascinating because, like us, they met when they were close to the start of their literary journeys and became each other’s ‘travelling companions’, never afraid to acknowledge the depth of support they had given each other.

After Holtby’s death at the age of 36, Brittain would go on to immortalise their relationship in her book Testament of Friendship, a fitting tribute from the woman once described by her pal as ‘the person who made me’.

 Activity

Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby’s friendship nearly failed to get off the ground due to their initial impressions of each other. Hopefully avoiding any risk to our friendship, we’ve set ourselves the challenge this month of casting our minds back to when we met to describe our first take on each other.

As always, we are interested in hearing your suggestions about other writing friendships we could profile on Something Rhymed. You can Tweet us or use the ‘Leave a Reply’ tab below to get in touch.