Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership, and: Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (review)
the valorization of working-class culture during the fifties, one should perhaps simply be grateful that so many of the works Jean E. Kennard and Susan J. Leonardi deal with are again available and hope that all of them may become so during one's lifetime. Kennard's bookÂ—the first extensive study of Brittain's and Holtby's workÂ— employs a new formulation of Chodorow's hypothesis that, because of her early relationship to her mother, a woman's heterosexuality is necessarily triangular, needing a child for completion: a woman might, instead of a child, depend on a close friendship with a woman in her lifelong struggle to wrest independence from her mother. Such, Kennard believes, was the function of their friendship in both Brittain's and Holtby's psychological economy. Although their first interactions were hostile, what they valued in their relationship was similarity of interest and outlook rather than difference, so that each came to play for the other the role of second self. Thus their relationship was based on an ongoing dialogue, which, Kennard suggests, often characterizes close female friendships. Kennard draws upon reader-response theory to describe the mechanism by which "the reader of one text becomes the author of another text, which is a rewriting of what she has read." She traces this dialogue through the two oeuvres, for example reading Holtby's The Crowded Street as an answer to The Dark Tide, both of which include portrayals of Brittain and Holtby, and Honourable Estate as a rÃ©ponse to South Riding, Holtby's posthumous novel, which Brittain corrected in typescript and galley proof while she was working on her own novel. The theme of each is reconciliation with the past, which for Brittain and Holtby involved coming to terms with their mothers.