Testament Of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (Virago classic non-fiction) - Softcover

Vera Brittain

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9780860680352: Testament Of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (Virago classic non-fiction)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0860680355 ISBN 13: 9780860680352

Publisher: Virago, 2004

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In 1914 Vera Brittain was eighteen and, as war was declared, she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the life of her whole generation - had changed in a way that was unimaginable in the tranquil pre-war era.

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH, one of the most famous autobiographies of the First World War, is Brittain's account of how she survived the period; 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.

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Review

In 1914 Vera Brittain was 21 years old, and an undergraduate student at Somerville College, Oxford. When war broke out in August of that year, Brittain "temporarily" disrupted her studies to enrol as a volunteer nurse, nursing casualties both in England and on the Western Front. The next four years were to cause a deep rupture in Brittain's life, as she witnessed not only the horrors of war first hand, but also experienced the quadruple loss of her fianc�, her brother, and two close friends. Testament of Youth is a powerfully written, unsentimental memoir which has continued to move and enthral readers since its first publication in 1933. Brittain, a pacifist since her First World War experiences, prefaces the book with a fairy tale, in which Catherine, the heroine, encounters a fairy godmother and is given the choice of having either a happy youth or a happy old age. She selects the latter and so her fate is determined: "Now this woman," warns the tale, "was the destiny of poor Catherine." And we find as we delve deeper into the book that she was the destiny of poor Vera too.

Review

" Miss Brittain has written a book which stands alone among books written by women about the war." -- Sunday Times

" Today, Testament is firmly enshrined in the canon of the literature of the first world war.." -- Guardian, August 30, 2003

"Nothing else in the literature of the first world war charts so clearly the path leading from erosion of innocence.." -- Guardian, August 30, 2003

‘heartrending personal account of a generation of young men being killed on the Western Front in the First World War’ -- Sir Bernard Ingham, Sunday Express

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