This is a biographical study of the English writer and social activist Vera Brittain, (1893-1970). Author of more than twenty books and a successful journalist, Brittain is best known for her autobiographical Testament of Youth, which is remembered as the most important book of the First World War written from a woman's perspective. In the interwar decades, Vera Brittain became a staunch advocate of equal-rights feminism, an internationalist, and, by the late 1930s, a pacifist.

In this book, Deborah Gorham focuses on Vera Brittain's struggles and achievements as a feminist. She contends that in both her public and private life, Brittain was representative of the group of educated middle-class women who brought to fruition the goals of Victorian bourgeois feminism in the years following the Great War.