Testament Of Youth

Remains one of the most powerful and widely read war memoirs of all time * Guardian *Vera Brittain’s heart-rending account of the way her generation’s lives changed is still as shocking and moving as ever * Sunday Telegraph *A heartbreaking account of the impact of the First World War on a stout-hearted, high-minded young woman * Sunday Times *Like the much-misunderstood poppy, Testament both memorializes and warns … to remain uninformed is actually life-threatening * Times Literary Supplement *Sublimely moving … this is a truly great book … should be compulsory reading for the nation’s debauched and aimless yobs and yobettes * Daily Mail *Essential reading, not just as an anti-war polemic but as a portrait of a whole generation of young people who were totally ill-prepared and whose lives were utterly changed within four momentous years * Historical Novels Review *Its raw emotional truth populated my understanding of history with real human beings – Beatriz Williams, a.k.a.Juliana Gray * The Week *

Vera Brittain was born in 1893, and grew up in provincial comfort in Macclesfield and Buxton. In 1914, just as war was breaking out, she won an exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, interrupting her studies the following year to enlist as a VAD nurse. She became one of the best-loved writers of her time with the publication, in 1933, of her passionate record of a lost generation, Testament of Youth. She wrote twenty-nine books in all, and was a prolific lecturer and journalist, who devoted much of her energy to the causes of peace and feminism. Vera Brittain died in 1970. The authorised biography, Vera Brittain: A Life (1995) by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge is published by Virago Press.