Vera Brittain is a serious writer, and in a foreword she firmly states the purpose of ["Honorable Estate"] which "purports to show how the women's revolution—one of the greatest in all history—combined with the struggle for other democratic ideals and the cataclysm of the war to alter the private destinies of individuals." It is a very serious novel, and covers the period 1890–1930.

The first section is concerned with Janet Rutherston, married at nineteen to a clergyman much older than herself. Disliking vicarage life and the vicar, disliking the son she had not wanted, disliking domesticity, passionately interested in politics and women's rights, she was thwarted by her husband's angry contempt for her proclivities towards militant suffrage, and died embittered at the age of forty-three. The second section (the best part of the book, strongly reminiscent of "Testament of Youth") is about the more conventional Alleyndene m...