Testament of Youth

Summary

Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford. She wins a place at Somerville just as war breaks out in 1914. Through her younger brother Edward she meets his school friend Roland Leighton, a brilliant, ambitious young poet, and they fall in love, conducting much of their courtship by letter after he enlists. Brittain leaves Oxford in 1915 to become a VAD nurse, first in a Buxton hospital and then at the First London General Hospital in Camberwell, so as to share something of the danger and hardship of the men she loves. Roland is fatally wounded in France in December 1915; she learns of his death on the day after Christmas, while expecting him home on leave. She then serves in Malta, where she falls ill, and later in France at Étaples, close to the front, where she nurses German prisoners and, during the German spring offensive of 1918, gassed and grievously wounded British soldiers. Meanwhile the two other friends of the group of four young men she calls her circle die: Geoffrey Thurlow is killed at Arras, and Victor Richardson is blinded and dies of his wounds in 1917. Called home in 1918 to care for her parents, she learns in June that Edward has been killed in action on the Italian front. Part Three describes the bleak aftermath. Brittain returns to Oxford to read history, feeling herself a ghost among younger students who know nothing of the war, and suffering what she later understood as a nervous breakdown. Her recovery begins with her friendship with the writer Winifred Holtby, with whom she shares lodgings in London, journalism and lecturing for the League of Nations Union. The memoir ends with her marriage in 1925 to the political scientist George Catlin, identified only as G. The book combines extensive quotation from letters and diaries, which she includes to show how young people actually felt at the time, with retrospective analysis, and it moves from patriotic idealism to grief and finally to a feminist and pacifist commitment born of loss.

Top Lessons

• War from the home front and the hospital

  Brittain shows a war experienced through letters, telegrams and hospital wards. Her memoir widened the canon of war writing beyond the soldier's trench narrative.

• Grief that changes a life's direction

  Successive losses lead Brittain from patriotic sacrifice to pacifism and feminist activism. The book shows how private grief can become public purpose.

• The lost generation of women

  Brittain insists that women too were a war generation, deprived of partners and futures. Her account of postwar Oxford reveals the isolation of the survivor.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Testament of Youth is a major primary source for the history of military nursing and of women's war trauma. Brittain describes VAD training and the hierarchy between volunteers and professional nursing sisters, the dressing of septic and gas-gangrenous wounds, the care of mustard-gas cases, amputees and dying men, and the conditions of base hospitals in Malta and Étaples. She records her own illness in Malta. Her postwar account of isolation, numbness, intrusive memories and a period in which she was convinced her face was changing in the mirror is often read as a description of post-traumatic disturbance, though she used the vocabulary of 'nerves' and breakdown available in the 1920s; present clinical readings as interpretations. The deaths of her circle also trace the medical fates of the war: wounds in the abdomen, blinding, and death in casualty clearing stations.

• Part II (Camberwell)

  First experiences as a VAD at the First London General Hospital, learning to dress wounds and confronting the realities of injury.

• Part II (Roland's death)

  Brittain learns that Roland has died of wounds, and later receives his returned kit, still muddy and bloodstained.

• Part II (Malta)

  Nursing in Malta, including her own illness during service there.

• Part II (Étaples)

  Nursing German prisoners and, in spring 1918, gassed and badly wounded British soldiers in overwhelmed wards.

• Part II (Victor Richardson)

  Victor, blinded by a wound to the head, is visited in a London hospital before dying of his injuries.

• Part III

  Postwar Oxford: estrangement, numbness, nightmares and a period of distressing perceptions about her own face, followed by gradual recovery.