The New Books: 'Honourable Estate'
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 ménage and the Alleyndene daughter, Ruth, a nurse during the war, who had a brief, ecstatic love affair with an American soldier who was afterwards killed. The last section is the story of Ruth's marriage to Denis Rutherston, a happy marriage in an almost symbolic sense. Ruth is Janet's political heir. Denis has profited by the lessons of his parents and is anxious that Ruth shall not be prevented by maternity or domesticity from fulfilling herself in her political career. A less patient man than Denis might have found Ruth's preoccupation with her early love affair a thought trying when it persisted ten years and more after the event, but Denis was patient.
It must be reluctantly admitted that the author, a brilliant writer endowed with many literary gifts, does not number the novelist's gift among them. There was more emotional force to her autobiography than there is here, where it is sorely needed. Though one can never find fault with her superb use of the King's English or with the sincerity of her purpose, she largely fails in her achievement. The purpose of the book is to show the cruelty of woman's one time bondage and the struggles undergone to set her free. If this purpose succeeds we have to believe Janet Rutherston worth saving and mourn the cruelty of her lot. And Janet is very difficult to believe in at all.
The novel is written from a strongly feminist point of view;—a perfectly good point of view, of course, but even an ardent feminist may question the artistic validity of brisk, kind, women doctors, competent and unswerving in their devotion to duty, in unvarying contrast to coarse male doctors who are too careless to be on hand for difficult confinements and who are clumsy and inefficient to boot. (pp. 32-3)
C.H.M., "The New Books: 'Honourable Estate'," in The Saturday Review of Literature (copyright © 1936 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. XV, No. 3, November 14, 1936, p. 32.
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