Testament of Youth

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 everyone she loved. Testament of Youthis both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplementas a book that helped both form and define the mood of its time,” it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.

Vera Brittain (1893-û1970) served as a nurse in the British armed forces in World War I and afterward devoted herself to the causes of peace and feminism. She wrote twenty-nine books, of which Testament of Youth is the best-known.
Mark Bostridge is a biographer and literary critic who lives in London.