Miss Vera Brittain is a stirring person, and to stay with her through six hundred of her closely written, documented pages is a moving experience. In this first novel, Honourable Estate, she is trying deliberately to raise the status of woman, to record what has been achieved in the last four decades in her struggle for liberty and equality, throwing into question the whole notion of woman as inevitably domestic, and ending up with stressing as a last phase the married woman's need of a career. (p. 33)

Obviously Miss Brittain's gifts are not domestic—some day perhaps one of the 'new' women will appear in print as a glamorously good cook—but she can put herself intensely into her characters, especially when they are wrought from her own experience. Because of this the war years are the best in the book. One knows that she gives a one-sided...