Testament Of Youth

'Remains one of the most powerful and widely read war memoirs of all time' GUARDIAN 'Vera Brittain's heart-rending account of the way her generation's lives changed is still as shocking and moving as ever' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'A heartbreaking account of the impact of the First World War on a stout-hearted, high-minded young woman' SUNDAY TIMES What you have striven for will not end in nothing, all that you have done and been will not be wasted, for it will be a part of me as long as I live, and I shall remember, always.In 1914 Vera Brittain was twenty, and as war was declared she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the lives of a whole generation - had been unimaginably changed. One of the most famous autobiographies of the First World War, this is her 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 to become one of the best-loved writers of her time.

Vera Brittain was born in 1893, and grew up in provincial comfort in Macclesfield and Buxton. In 1914, just as war was breaking out, she won an exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, interrupting her studies the following year to enlist as a VAD nurse. She became one of the best-loved writers of her time with the publication, in 1933, of her passionate record of a lost generation, Testament of Youth. She wrote twenty-nine books in all, and was a prolific lecturer and journalist, who devoted much of her energy to the causes of peace and feminism. Vera Brittain died in 1970. The authorised biography, Vera Brittain: A Life (1995) by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge is published by Virago Press.