I was reading her diary in conjunction; the diary essentially stopped when she goes to Malta and at that point I needed a break from the raw emotion. I also own a book of the correspondence of Vera and her four soldiers, but I think I have to let that go for a while.
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Originally Posted by desertblues
It is hard to put down this book. I feel that the emotions of the nursing experience of Vera are written from the heart, more than the ones of her early years as a young girl.
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I think that her editorial hand was a little too strong when it came to her early years; I suspect it had something to do with her pride and her self-image, just as we have the evidence that she aged Roland by a year. Her early diary I thought was characterized by enthusiasm rather than rationality and her love of literature by emotion and personal resonance rather than intellect. In fact, I rather share her own astonishment at getting a Somerville exhibition! She also, as I mentioned, enjoyed the social whirl far more than she allows in retrospect.
One issue that leaves me gobsmacked every time I've read this, is that Roland didn't tell Vera of his conversion, neither in his correspondence nor at their last meeting. Oddly to me, even with hindsight Vera retains her deistic/agnostic perspective and ascribes it to Roland, also, and later I think she does him a potential disservice by assigning rather shallow motives to his action - his love of the pageantry and pomp.
I combine this with Vera's obtuseness about her brother's homosexuality and while I'm not surprised that he wouldn't tell her, times being what they were, I come away with the sense that Roland's and Edward's hearts and minds were not nearly as open to Vera as she thought. There's this sentence that Vera wrote to Edward, "I think there’s every hope for you in time to come from some woman several years older than you are now,’ when Edward had gone so far as to tell Vera that he didn't understand or like women. Vera cast her response in terms of her own relation to Roland, it seems to me, and even felt validated in her dislike of women, perhaps.
I admit it, I don't like Vera. I feel her pain about which she writes so excruciatingly, but there's something in her self-absorption that puts me off. I think she wrote a great book, but she reminds me of that old saw about loving humanity and not being able to stand people.
However, my memory of the book is imperfect and I have yet to finish this go-round, so perhaps I in turn will be kinder about her in the end.