Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900 – 1925 By Vera Brittain

One woman’s unforgettable record of the First World War, ‘Testament of Youth’ is in spirit and impact as powerful a classic as All Quiet on the Western Front and Goodbye to All That – a haunting elegy for a lost generation. Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain’s 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 war’s 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. Softcover. Published by Virago 2006