Women resist dictatorship: voices from Latin America

This article re-visits the friendship of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby through some (largely unpublished) correspondence exchanged in 1926. Building on a body of literature which asserts the personal and professional importance of this friendship, my own analysis moves beyond what I identify as a polarisation of ‘work’; and ‘sexuality’ and reveals a friendship where professional and erotic interests are engaged in a dynamic exchange. In addition, I argue that the ways in which work and desire ‘trade’ with each other in this friendship are symptomatic of material and discursive conditions concerning women's work and sexuality in the interwar period. Specifically, ‘work’ will be seen to stand in for and legitimise a friendship which may be placed under censorious scrutiny, while ‘desire’ is displaced onto real professional ambitions which become possible at this historical moment. Brittain and Holtby were among scores of middle-class women becoming professional writers in large numbers for the first time in English history. Their ‘trade’ in work and desire invites more complex readings of other intense friendships which enabled women to succeed in professional life like never before.