Testament of youth

Description

A vivid and passionate record of the years 1900 to 1925, this is Vera Brittain's haunting autobiography - a portrait of a young girl's life in prewar England and a heartbreaking document of the holocaust of war. The author tells us about the war she saw and poignantly describes how it was to watch the gradual destruction of her generation. Raised in provincial comfort during a gentle age, Brittain won a scholarship to Oxford, then fell profoundly in love with a friend of her adored brother Edward, just as the country crept toward the edge of war. We follow four agonizing years of war through Brittain's eyewitness accounts of life without hope in London and at the front in France. In 1915 she abandoned her studies and enlisted in the army as a voluntary nurse. By war's end Vera Brittain had become a convinced pacifist and feminist. In 1919 she came back to Oxford to finish her studies. It was at this time that she met Winifred Holtby, who became her greatest friend and ally. Returning to London in 1921, she devoted herself to the cause of world peace and struggled to earn her living as a journalist. First published in 1933, this famous best-seller was acclaimed as "the real war book of the women of England." In spirit and impact it is such a moving elegy to a lost generation that P.D. James wrote of it: "This is one of those books which help both form and define the mood of its time." Comparable to *All Quiet on the Western Front*, this powerful book is another classic of World War I - from a woman's point of view.

First Sentence

WHEN THE Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.

Description

"In 1915 Vera Brittain abandoned her studies at Oxford to enlist as a nurse in the armed services. Before the war was over she had served in London, Malta, and close to the Western Front in France--and she had lost all the men she loved. Out of athat experience came this cauterizing book, at once a memoir and an elegy for the bright, passionate generation who came of age on the eve of the war and vanished in its trenches."--Back cover.

Subjects

Genres

• Personal narratives, English
• Biography

Other Editions

• Testament of youth: an autobiographical study of the years 1900-1925Penguin Books2004-01-01
• Testament of youthVictor Gollancz1933-01-01
• Testament of youthGollancz1933-01-01
• Testament of youthVictor Gollancz Ltd.1948-01-01
• Testament of youthCedric Chivers1971-01-01
• Testament of youthGollancz1978-01-01