Testament of Youth

In 1933, Vera Brittain’s honest and compelling account of her young adult experiences during World War I appeared in the form of an autobiography titled Testament of Youth. This important work of British literature became an immediate sensation upon publication in both England and the United States. Full of poetry and excerpts from personal letters, this deeply personal account of Brittain’s life from 1914 to 1925 documents the impact of World War I on Brittain and her family, her friends, and her colleagues. Brittain’s authentic rendering of both her emotional and her intellectual world continues to resonate with readers seeking to learn more about the catastrophic effect of the Great War on the younger generation of the early 20th century. Thanks to Brittain, the world is much more aware of the significant contribution of women to the war effort, a contribution previously dismissed in light of the sacrifices so many men made with their lives. 

The popularity of Testament of Youth waned somewhat after World War II, and even though the British Broadcast Company adapted the book into a documentary series on the 50th anniversary of the start of World War I, Brittain’s masterpiece fell to the wayside of popular culture. Brittain’s star began to rise anew in 1978, when feminist publishing house Virago Press reprinted Testament of Youth, and in 2015, a film version of Testament of Youth by James Kent brought the autobiography back into the limelight.

Brittain lost her fiancé, her brother, and two close male friends to the war, all between the ages of 20 and 24. The grief and confusion she sustains is all the more poignant from letters that warn Brittain of their deaths, and her deeply sincere responses encouraging them to keep hope alive. When the war ends on November 11, 1918, Brittain is disillusioned and morose; she observes the world moving on without her with a detachment that hides burning anger towards the establishments that led her most valued companions to their deaths.

At the start of the autobiography, Brittain describes her comfortable early life in the Midlands of England. An ambitious and intellectually gifted young woman and a feminist from an early age, she finds her hometown and its conventional expectations of women limiting; Oxford University beckons with its promise of a rich life of the mind. Brittain works tirelessly to pass a series of entrance examinations, and just as she receives word that she has been accepted to study literature at Oxford, war breaks out; Brittain is only 20 years old. As her fiancé Roland Leighton and her brother Edward prepare to go to the front in France, Brittain summons all her courage and interrupts her academic career to volunteer with the Red Cross as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment). She becomes a nurse, working in military settings in England, Malta, and France, until the war is nearly over. A few months after Armistice Day, Brittain returns to Oxford, choosing to study history instead of literature with the hopes of learning more about “how the whole calamity had happened.” The autobiography ends optimistically, as Brittain, now a pacifist, plans for a new beginning in 1925, the year in which she marries George Catlin on June 27, exactly ten years to the day since the inception of her nursing career.

With her husband George Catlin, Brittain had two children. Her son John died in 1987, and her daughter Shirley became a cabinet minister for the Labour Party, a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party, and a Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords. In 1970, Vera Brittain died in London after a fall at the age of 76.