Testament of Youth

Vera Brittain

Jul 2009 · Sold by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

About this ebook

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

A British woman recalls coming of age during World War I in this unforgettable true story of young love, war, and how to make sense of the darkest times

'Remains one of the most powerful and widely read war memoirs of all time'
Guardian

'A haunting elegy for a lost generation'
The Times

'Should be compulsory reading'
Daily Mail

In 1914 when war was declared, Vera Brittain was twenty, preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the lives of her whole generation - had changed in a way that would have been unimaginable.

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH, one of the most famous autobiographies of the First World War, is Brittain's account of how she survived those agonising years; how she lost the man she loved; how she nursed the wounded and how she emerged into an altered world.

A passionate record of a lost generation, it made Vera Brittain one of the best-loved writers of her time, and has lost none of its power to shock, move and enthral readers since its first publication in 1933.

With an afterword from Kate Mosse OBE.

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About the author

Born in 1893, Vera Brittain won an exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, in 1914, but a year later abandoned her studies to enlist as a VAD nurse. She served throughout the war, working in London, Malta and close to the Front in France. At the end of the war, with all of those closest to her dead, she returned to Oxford.

Vera Brittain was a convinced pacifist, a prolific speaker, lecturer, journalist and writer, she devoted much of her energy to the causes of peace and feminism. She wrote 29 books in all, novels, poetry, biography and autobiography, but it was TESTAMENT OF YOUTH which established her reputation and made her one of the best-loved writers of her time. She died in 1970.