Vain Adventure

This partly-autobiographical novel, written in 1923 and published in 1927, is set in London and Oxford during the first quarter of the 20th century. Its central character is Mary Carthew, an only child, whose father has business connections with Germany when she is young. When the war breaks out, her father's business goes into decline and Mary is removed from boarding school. The latter part of the novel is concerned with her life among the pioneering female students at Oxford.

The author, Kathleen Gibberd (born 5 March 1897), grew up in Hornsey and Enfield in Middlesex. Her mother died in 1905 and her father remarried in 1910. She had two brothers, one from each marriage, but neither were old enough to serve in the war. Her cousin, John Alexander Gibberd (born in 1898), was her closest relative to serve in the war (with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve). Like the central character of this novel, she was a student at St Hilda’s, Oxford. Although she went on to write more than 20 non-fiction books, Vain Adventure was her only novel.

The author reflects on the experience of grief and loss common to so many people in the post-war years by transferring her own mother’s death to the adulthood of Mary Carthew. Mary’s mother tells her daughter that she is excited to watch her grow up:
“Don't you see it has been an adventure to me just to see what sort of a woman you are going to grow into?”
Discussing her mother’s death with an elderly friend, Mary ponders life as an adventure:
“I've always liked to think of life as an adventure.”
He replies: “Well, can you have an adventure if you know exactly what's going to happen in the end?"
“We have set sail in our ship, you know, and we can either hoist our courage or we can spend our time looking for danger ahead of us. We choose between faith and fear.”

While at Oxford Mary is involved in founding the Oxford Peace Research Group. Its verdict on warfare was clear:
“the ultimate causes of war lay in defective systems of education throughout the world — defective, because they provided instruction for the mind instead of promoting the growth of the spirit.”
A friend makes a speech to a meeting of the group:
“When people talk about war being inevitable because of the fighting instinct in man, they are talking nonsense. There is no instinct which makes a man at certain intervals in his life go out and kill some one who he has never seen.”