Testament of Youth
by Vera Brittain
Summary
Vera Brittain leaves Oxford's Somerville College in 1915 to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, tending wounded soldiers in London, on Malta, and close behind the front lines in Étaples, France. The memoir follows her engagement to Roland Leighton, a fellow student turned officer killed by a sniper in December 1915 just as she is preparing to meet him on Christmas leave; within the next two years she loses her closest friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow to the same war, and finally her younger brother Edward, killed on the Italian front in June 1918, only months before the armistice. Brittain writes each loss with the same restraint she brings to her nursing work, refusing to soften what four consecutive deaths did to a woman barely into her twenties. The book follows her back to a changed Oxford after the war, into early journalism and lecturing for the League of Nations, and closes with her 1925 marriage to the political scientist George Catlin, a life rebuilt rather than a wound healed.
Brittain worked directly from her own wartime diaries rather than reconstructing events from memory, and that closeness gives the book an unusual, almost clinical precision about grief; she names names, dates and places rather than reaching for consoling generalities. It reads slowly in its early chapters and devastatingly by its middle third, and it remains one of very few full accounts of the First World War told from a woman's vantage point at the front rather than from a soldier's.
Brittain later published two further memoirs continuing her own story, but Testament of Youth stood alone for decades as her defining book, and the outspoken pacifism that grew directly out of what the war had cost her made her an unpopular, sometimes harassed figure once Britain went to war again in 1939.
Historical Context & Significance
Victor Gollancz published Testament of Youth in Britain in 1933, with Macmillan bringing out an American edition the same year, and the memoir became an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic; no major literary prize of the period was built to recognize memoir the way fiction prizes recognized the novel, and none is recorded as having considered it.
The book has never gone out of print, and its standing has only grown as a founding text of both war memoir and twentieth century feminist writing, read as much now for Brittain's account of fighting for an Oxford education as for its record of loss. The BBC adapted it as a five part television drama in 1979 with Cheryl Campbell as Brittain, and a 2014 feature film starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington brought it to a new audience during the war's centenary commemorations, more than eighty years after Brittain first wrote it down.