Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Brittain was enlightened for her age, but I found this passage unsettling.
She highly valued her intimacy with her beloved brother, and yet it's obvious he kept his homsexuality a secret from her. Roland also will keep at least one major personal issue from her, which she only discovers later. It's rather obvious that Vera doesn't care for other women and prides herself on her closeness to men, but at least some of that is more on her side, apparently..
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I have just got through to the very beginning of the War. On the matter of not liking other women, in her defence she at that time didn't have any women friends who were in any way like her. They were the unintellectual product of their schools and upbringing, when the aim in life was to get married, preferably as "well" as possible.
I remember doing a year of purgatory after I left school and went to a secretarial college (because I hated school and wouldn't stay on to matriculate - it took me ten years to get over that and realise I wanted to study). I was surrounded by vacuous females who thought I was weird because I actually read books during lunch time instead of sitting around talking about boys and pop music. It was awful, and I can remember thinking that if work was like this, life really wasn't worth living. Ah, the dramatics of youth! I was 17. Fortunately I found that it got better once I actually started work and was able to afford things like learning to play the flute, having German conversation lessons, fencing and of course, buying books!