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Testament of Youth

by Vera Brittain, Mark Bostridge (Introduction)

4.15 of 5 stars 4.15 · rating details · 1,184 ratings · 152 reviews

Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain's elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war's end she had lost virtually ever...more

Paperback, 688 pages

Published May 31st 2005 by Penguin Classics (first published 1933)

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Mar 12, 2013 Steelwhisper rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: wwi, 02-r

Where to start?

I started reading Testament of Youth mainly for the information on WW1, not knowing that apart from suffering heartbreaking losses and being a VAD nurse, Vera Brittain also was a feminist of the first hour and a writer of great astuteness.

In consequence she proceeded to reduce me to openmouthed admiration as early on as her description of youth and life prior to the Great War. Never before have I truly understood the massive societal changes wrought upon people during that short p...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Vicki Seldon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Now that Downton Abbey Season 2 has premiered with so much of revolving around cataclysmic tragedy and change caused by WWI, my thoughts turn back to this book. Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain's memoir of life, love, and loss during WWI first came to my attention because of Masterpiece Theater which serialized it at least 20 years ago. In 2010, I read her memoir again and I may reread it a third time as I also experience these events through the fictional characters of Downton Abbey. If you ha...more

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Apr 17, 2012 Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Vera Brittain was, at that time, a bit younger that my daughter is now. Her elder brother Edward was then also one or two years younger than my son today. Sometimes I still see my children as babies, scratching their backs when they need to relax.

My daughter had just finished her first year of college with excellent grades, missing the Dean's list by a point. At that time, Vera Brittain had also just gotten in Somerville in Oxford on a scholarship. She was doing very well there. Unlike most girl...more

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Feb 17, 2009 Ellie rated it 3 of 5 stars

I first read this when I was in high school and, back then, I found it haunting -- mostly, I suppose, because I couldn't grasp the concept of death. Revisiting it today, after having suffered personal loss, I don't find it as haunting but still very interesting. The book is pretty long and sometimes turns tedious but it is fascinating to read a first hand account of the rapid social changes for women that resulted from the death of a generation of young men in the slaughter-fest that was WWI. Al...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Debbie Robson rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've long heard of this book and presumed that it was such a classic because Brittain was (unfortunately) in the right position to write such a book ie working in the nursing service during WWI and secondly losing all the major males in her life except her father. But the book is much more than that. Brittain is an intelligent and gifted writer who manages somehow to write about the most harrowing of ordeals with an acute eye and a sense of balance that is surprising.
I was only going to skim th...more

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Jan 31, 2009 Graceann rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Feminists, history buffs

Shelves: memoir, history

Please see my detailed review at Amazon Graceann's "Testament of Youth" Review"

Please click that the review was helpful to you at Amazon so that my rating continues to climb!

More a book that you study and admire than love, but well worth the effort. A lot was demanded of me in these 661 pages - I have a wide-ranging vocabulary, but Vera Brittain is in a class by herself. The best and most interesting section is the middle third, in which Vera discusses her war work and her worries for those she...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Tiffany Campbell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, bookgroup

This book changed everything. I had read everything on WWi. But it was not until this author that the reality of the situation hit me. Yes I had read about the lost generation and understood the horror. But it was not until she is back after the war studying and she is going to see her parents and she realizes in its full desolation that there is no one in the entire world left alive that holds the same memories. Her brother is dead her fiancé is dead all her contemporaries are dead. It is as if...more

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Dec 27, 2012 Kathleen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was put off for a long time by this book’s formidable length—661 pages. I’m glad I finally found myself in the proper frame of mind to tackle it, as it was well worth the effort.

Brittain’s Testament of Youth is the story of the author’s youth as shaped by the defining event of the era, “the Great War,” as WWI was then known. That war deprived Brittain of her fiancé, her beloved brother, and two very dear friends, but it was also the catalyst that made her the strong, independent, determined wo...more I was put off for a long time by this book’s formidable length—661 pages. I’m glad I finally found myself in the proper frame of mind to tackle it, as it was well worth the effort.

Brittain’s Testament of Youth is the story of the author’s youth as shaped by the defining event of the era, “the Great War,” as WWI was then known. That war deprived Brittain of her fiancé, her beloved brother, and two very dear friends, but it was also the catalyst that made her the strong, independent, determined woman she was to become. Her experiences as a wartime nurse enabled her to see beyond the propaganda and patriotic slogans of the day to the heart of the conflict—of all such conflicts—and she came away with what I can only describe as a cynical idealism, or perhaps I should say an idealistic cynicism? She devoted the remainder of her life to the abolition of war as a means of settling conflicts, and was still, in her seventies, being arrested for her participation in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.

But back to the book itself. It was written in 1933 and covers the period between 1914 and 1925. It abounds in details about the upbringing of proper young ladies of the era, political movements of the time, and the deplorable conditions in military hospitals during the war, both at home (England), in Malta, and at the front in France. Excerpts from letters she received from those in the trenches, including poetry written there, illuminate the abominable conditions endured by the troops. Accounts of the unofficial truces reached by the men in the trenches, and Brittain’s experiences nursing German POWs are particularly poignant.

Brittain, who began life as a proper, shy, middle-class young lady, was transformed by the war into an outspoken proponent of internationalism, an ardent feminist, and an eloquent spokeswoman for her generation. Sadly, she later lost her only son in yet another war (WWII), one which she already knew was inevitable back in 1925.
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Dec 27, 2012 Ien van Houten rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

World War I killed a generation of the best and brightest young men of the participating countries. They volunteered by the thousands, filled with high ideals of heroism and sacrifice "For King and Country". Or the Emperor, or La Patrie et La Gloire, whatever the case. Few returned, and of those many were scarred for life, as is always the case.

This haunting memoir describes the Great Insanity from a woman's point of view.

Vera Brittain, the sheltered daughter of a provincial manufacturer, is twe...more

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Oct 02, 2012 Philip rated it 5 of 5 stars

Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain is significantly more than an autobiography of a young woman. It presents, at least initially, a portrait of a society that nowadays appears quite foreign, takes us through a war that changed that society and rendered it obsolete and then leads us into an era that promised a new start, but which proved to be no more than a transition to the kind of modernity we now recognise. Testament Of Youth thus reads like a personalised view of history, written by an auth...more Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain is significantly more than an autobiography of a young woman. It presents, at least initially, a portrait of a society that nowadays appears quite foreign, takes us through a war that changed that society and rendered it obsolete and then leads us into an era that promised a new start, but which proved to be no more than a transition to the kind of modernity we now recognise. Testament Of Youth thus reads like a personalised view of history, written by an author who was conscious of change as it happened, and, indeed, was am agent in that change. Vera Brittain was also capable of appreciating the consequences that would follow.

Prior to the outbreak of World War One, Vera Brittain inhabited what were then described as the English middle classes. They bore no resemblance to what we nowadays identify with that label. These people were not merely professionally employed and propertied. They might proudly own two or three abodes here and there. They probably had servants, though they might not have referred to them as such. Private income was common, as were assumptions about education, marriage, career, deportment, manners and a host of other social trappings.

This, of course, was an era when only a small fraction of the population had any access to higher education, where women could not vote, where Britain still thought she ruled the waves. The Empire was still very much intact. Despite her commitment to feminism and her desire for independence, Vera Brittain seems, at the start of her memoir, to be heading by default straight for convention, as currently assumed by her class. But then the war came.

World War One lasted more than four years. The carnage was on a scale the world had never previously witnessed, and of an industrial type that had only recently been manufactured. Unlike modern warfare, however, the majority of the casualties were combatants, not civilian. By World War two, of course, the paradigm had changed,

World War One killed off almost a complete generation of young European men. Like many women, Vera Brittain joined up herself, feeling that she must contribute to the war effort in some direct way. But she became a nurse and her experiences caring for the wounded from the trenches form the bulk of Testament Of Youth. Her description of her work and those she nursed are vivid but balanced by detachment. She relates her experience without exaggeration, lists the horrors without once trying to shock for the sake of effect. Some of the most moving passages relate to those whose injuries were so severe they were left untreated. The stoicism with which they accepted their deaths is portrayed in its full, cold, terrifying inevitability.

At the end of the war, Vera Brittain can only be described as being in a state of shock. She had lost family and friends, and the man she would probably have married. She had nursed countless wounded, many close to death, many disfigured or jut shot to bits. By the end of 1918, it was clear that the world was not going to return to what it had been at the start of the decade. Women, of necessity, had done work previously denied them. They had the vote. A generation of young men had been interred.

And so Vera Brittain returned to university, but to study history rather than literature. Her desire to write was still there, but now she wanted to do something political or journalistic in an attempt to prevent the carnage she had seen from ever happening again. She offered support to the League Of Nations. But there remained a vast hole in her personal world, an abyss that nowadays we might diagnose as post-traumatic stress.

Eventually, she has her writing published and the possibility of marriage and a family reappeared, just when as a woman in her thirties, she had begun to assume her life would not take that route.

Testament Of Youth is a magnificent account or war, not of combat or heroism, nor indeed of comradeship or anything to do with militarism. Testament Of Youth describes consequences, both direct and indirect, and reminds us of the depths of suffering plumbed by the insanity of conflict. It deserves a wide reading today, since there seems to have emerged a tendency to portray war as mere memoir, rather than as wholesale, industrial, indiscriminate slaughter.
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Aug 06, 2012 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Vera Brittain writes in a way that is both enjoyable and easy to read, which is refreshing as many historical autobiographies that I have read in the past struggle to maintain the reader's interest as much as Brittain seems to in Testament of Youth.

The book gives a good insight into lots of different aspects of life both before and after the First World War, particularly providing a commentary on how the status of women changed during this period. Starting as a 'typical' domestic girl, the read...more

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May 28, 2011 Vasha7 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

A memoir of World War I. Vera Brittain does a superb job of reconstructing her experiences from the perspective of a decade and a half later, hindsight being aided by rereading her diaries and letters. Mostly, it is focused on her thoughts and feelings, on a personal level. During the time when her fiancé filled all her thoughts, that is reflected in the book. Nonetheless, an impression of other people's situation comes through. Brittain also makes a number of scathing social observations. For i...more

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Feb 09, 2010 MadgeUK rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is the first of the middle class Edwardian Vera Brittain's account of the time leading up to WWI, the war and its immediate aftermath. Vera lost her fiance, her brother and two close friends in WWI and left Oxford, where she was a brilliant student, to become a nurse on the Western Front. Her experiences caused her to become a pacifist and tireless anti-war campaigner. This book is thought by some to be the finest account by a woman of the horrors of WWI.

Vera Brittain was a controversial f...more

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May 11, 2011 Oldesq rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

Written sixteen years after the First World War, Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth is a highly poetic memoir of her life in a too-small English town, her fight against convention to attend Somerville at Oxford and most especially her experience as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment- a group of women that assisted in military hospitals and ambulance service) during the Great War. The breadth of her experiences are amazing and Brittain's ability to use language to evoke an emotional response is very...more

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Jul 28, 2010 Pbwritr rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

Astounding book. I feel as if I know Vera Brittain. This book was truly written from the heart, and shows Vera and her contemporaries as they perceived themselves and the world to be before and during World War I. Luckily, Vera kept a journal, and had access to the letters that she and others wrote, so that the telling of the events and feelings is detailed and immediate. The reader can truly understand how--at least some--soldiers felt about being in the trenches, on the sidelines, wounded, see...more

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Mar 18, 2012 Jim George rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is intellectually enlightened, it is the author's story, as told from the front lines of WW1. The author grew up in a pampered upper class Victorian society, she enthusiastically pursued a literary education at Oxford University. Her successful matriculation in itself is more than commendable, her purposefulness and resolve is extraordinary. At the advent of WW1 her brother and their contemporary mates all enter into the war, she feels dutifully compelled to enlist into the VAD as a Vo...more

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Feb 05, 2012 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of my top five favourite books of all time. It's very hard for those of us fortunate enough to be born since World War II to understand just how big a tragedy the World Wars were. The percentage of the male population that was lost is simply staggering, and it's difficult to relate the numbers to the much larger populations of today. If you want to know something of what it was like to live through World War I, this beautifully written book will take you there. Vera Brittain was one of the v...more

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Aug 21, 2007 Deb rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anglophiles, WWI, BT fans

The BBC dramatisation of this book and the books themselves really brought home to me what the first world war was really like, and how constrained English women were by their social shibboleths. They are amazing historical documents.

BT fans should contrast Vera's parents with the Ray/Harts to gain new appreciation of how extraordinary Betsy's life really was.

Also, I recommend the novels of Winifred Holtby, Vera's friend.

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Jun 06, 2009 Christy rated it 4 of 5 stars

An exhausting and exhaustive memoir of a young woman's experience in the First World War as a VAD nurse, by the end of which she has lost her fiance, her two closest friends, and her only brother. Vera Brittain grew up in a provincial middle-class family, but whose early ambitions caused her to persuade her family into letting her go down to Oxford (What? Not getting married? Very shocking for a female). Inconveniently, the War erupted and in 1915, she left the studies she had so long prepared h...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Helen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, biography

This is an eyeopening book. An autobiography of a woman born just prior to the turn of the 20th C, describing her experiences through WW1 until 1925.

It is, as might be expected, massive in scope, describing how the war changed things on both a large and small scale. Individually, she lost the boys/men closest to her, as well as giving up her security and a university place to be a nurse. All of which has an emotional burden that is played out through the book. However, it is also clear how the...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Helen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reading-group, biography

Re-read, from Mar 2009.

Maybe it was because I had a deadline - it being this month's book club book, but I got really quite annoyed with this book. The most obvious element that annoyed me was the sensation that Vera seemed to think that the world owed her something because of her experiences during the war. It's a very modern sounding phrase that you hear from the youf "I got rights" and there are echoes of this in her return to Oxford, but she does seem to feel that she is special, despite th...more

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Feb 08, 2013 Marguerite Kaye rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book was written in 1933 and it's certainly very much of its time. In some ways, Vera Brittain as a narrator is pretty difficult to take, with her quite supercilious views and extremely introverted outlook. But in others - this is one of the most evocative books about the Great War I've read. The sheer scale of the tragedy, the pointless suffering, the feelings of betrayal that Brittain's generation felt when their patriotism and self-sacrifice was rewarded with death, mutilation and loss,...more

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May 19, 2013 Nick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: autobiography, biography, factual, historical-fiction, non-fiction

I have a problem with Vera Brittain: on the one hand, she has produced a moving and tragic biography, a fitting memorial to people dear to her who were lost in the war.
And yet, she could be very critical of people she felt were less worthy. Particularly in the first half of the book, where she describes her school days and teenage years, she comes across as snobbish and catty. For all her later achievements in politics and as a supporter of feminism and international co-operation, she was very c...more I have a problem with Vera Brittain: on the one hand, she has produced a moving and tragic biography, a fitting memorial to people dear to her who were lost in the war.
And yet, she could be very critical of people she felt were less worthy. Particularly in the first half of the book, where she describes her school days and teenage years, she comes across as snobbish and catty. For all her later achievements in politics and as a supporter of feminism and international co-operation, she was very critical of the people in the provincial towns where she grew up.
I'll put this down to the fact that most of this comes from her letters and journal entries made at the time when she still had much to learn about the world, but even when she compiles it years later, there's no hint of embarrassment or regret.

And then just when I think she's irritatingly supercilious and unsympathetic, she relates how she discovered her fiancé was had been machine-gunned at the battlefront, or how her brother's life was abruptly ended in Italy, and it's impossible not to feel enormous compassion for her.

Her descriptions of the kinds of injuries endured by soldiers, the kinds of things she had to treat as a VAD nurse, are truly gruesome. They must have been shocking around the time the book was written.

Now I read the opening lines of The Great Gatsby and see '"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."'
It's a shame VB didn't hear that advice before she wrote this book.

Now that I've got that out of my system, this book still stands as a fascinating history of Edwardian Britain, the First World War, and the enormous social and political changes in Britain and Europe in that first quarter of the twentieth Century.

The description of her friendship with Winifred Holtby is bittersweet when you know that Holtby would later die in her thirties and Brittain could not possibly have guessed this when the book was published.

And of course they could not have known then how Hitler would bring about another war even more shocking than the first.(less)

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Nov 23, 2011 bookczuk rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: stanford-book-salon, biography-autobiography-or-memoir, borrowed, taught-me-something, thank-you-charleston-county-library, sbs2011-12

I probably would have never picked this book up if it had not been on the Stanford Book Salon reading list for this year. The author tells the very public story of the events leading to the First World War, and of the War itself, but from a personal perspective of a young woman lost in the power of the events. Her personal loss and her absolute powerlessness were shattering to read, and make me realize how much the impact of history fades with time -- for if it didn't, we as a people would never...more

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Dec 10, 2012 Hilary G rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I know this is a classic and that much of what we know about how the First World War affected civilians we know from Testament of Youth. I know that Vera Brittain's life (and the life of a whole generation) was changed by the war. I know that she lost many loved ones including her fiance. I know it's a hymn to a lost generation. I know she was a lot braver than I would have been. Despite knowing all this, I found the book really annoying. The social milieu Vera came from is so different from min...more

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Aug 29, 2011 Philip Lane rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Brilliant account of what it was like for a young woman in the years leading up to, during and post WW1. Vera Brittain makes it all so vivid and personal. She constantly poses the question 'what was WW1 all about?'. Why was it necessary for that generation to go such sacrifice? and Should future generations make similar sacrifices??
Her life is bound up with her thirst for Literature and later History, her determination to serve her country as young men of her generation were doing and further th...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Jacqui N rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction-bio

Reread this book, had read it for the first time in the early 1980's. This lengthy memoir held my rapt attention until the latter chapters, where a lot of League Of Nations discussion set my mind wandering...yawn. I confess that wasn't as interesting to me. This book reveals just how much World War I changed the world, especially for women. She describes her prim, restrictive Edwardian upbringing where education was discouraged for women, single women couldn't be seen in public alone with a man,...more

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Sep 30, 2011 Julia Hughes rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: war, literature, autobiography

This is a vivid description of a young upper-middle class woman's experience of world war one as a volunteer nurse. It is faultless apart from the fact that I had the deepest depression after reading about the legalised slaughter of a generation of young men, which in turn deprived many many young women the chance of finding a mate. Not to mention leaving many parents childless.

No wonder the Great War was dubbed 'The War to end all wars.' Experiencing even second hand the futility of so many liv...more

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Nov 15, 2009 Helen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, world-war-i

I don't read many non-fiction books or biographies/autobiographies so this was something different for me. It was fascinating to read a personal account of the effects the war had on one woman's life and on society as a whole. Reading this book made me realise how little I actually knew about World War I. A lot of the places and events mentioned in the book were unfamiliar to me and left me wanting to find out more.

As I read about all the pain and sorrow she was forced to endure, I became comple...more

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Dec 17, 2008 Kendra Levine rated it 3 of 5 stars

I was eager to read this WWI memoir, but I couldn't relate to the themes as easily as "Goodbye to All That" by Robert Graves. I think part of this was that Brittain seemed to be more focused on herself than the universal suffering during war. That's to be expected in any memoir, but she really struggled to get past her privileged up bringing and Oxbridge life. Even when she was serving abroad, she seemed more concerned with her fantasies and memories of people than the gritty reality before her....more

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About Vera Brittain

British writer, feminist and pacifist.
Wikipedia page;
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Quotes from Testament of Youth

“There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think--which is fundamentally a moral problem--must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process.” — 5 people liked it

“How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die” — 5 people liked it

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