Hooray!
WINNER!!!
Well done Frybabe - it is indeed Vera Brittain, an upper-middle class girl whose brother, fiance and two close friends were all killed in the First World War. After one year of studying at Somerville, Oxford, she left the university and became a VAD nurse. After the war, she returned to Oxford and finished her degree, but her experiences had politicised her and she found it hard to settle.
She met Winifred Holtby - author of South Riding - and they began a lifelong friendship, sharing a flat together in London. They were both socialists and feminists, and both struggled to establish themselves as independent, educated, career women. Vera married George Catlin, a political scientist, in 1925, and they had a son and a daughter (Holtby continued to live with them after their marriage.) The daughter became Shirley Williams, a Labour politician who later broke away, with David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers, to form the Social Democrat Party (now the Liberal Democrats.)
Vera wrote novels and became a journalist. In 1933 she published Testament of Youth, her memoir of her early life and war experiences. She later wrote Testament of Friendship, which covered her friendship with Holtby, and Testament of Experience. During the 1930s she became a committed pacifist. She died in 1970, and Shirley fulfilled her mother's wish that her ashes should be scattered on her brother's grave in Italy.
In 1979, Cheryl Campbell starred in an acclaimed TV adaptation of Testament of Youth.
I read Testament of Youth as a teenager and was tremendously inspired by it - I still have my well-thumbed copy somewhere in the attic.
Over to you Frybabe!
