Testament of Youth

by Brittain, Vera

• ISBN13: 9780140188448
• ISBN10: 0140188444
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-09-01
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittains 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 wars end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. "Testament of Youth" is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the "Times Literary Supplement" as 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.

Author Biography

Vera Brittain (1893–1970) 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.