Testament of Youth was written by a woman approaching 40 who had spent some 17 years coming to terms with her singular experience of the first world war – as a girl, a fiancee, a feminist, a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse and, finally, as the sorrowing victim of intolerable grief. Brittain’s is one of several memoirs inspired by the fighting in Flanders, but it made a lasting impact through the raw passion of its anti-war message and its rather modern confessional candour. After much redrafting in various genres, including fiction, it was the success of Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929) that showed Brittain the way forward, creatively. A modern classic, Testament of Youth is both an elegy and a memoir, a book for all seasons that would have a remarkable literary afterlife in the 1970s and 1980s.

Brittain’s “autobiographical study” (she would never allow “autobiography”) takes her readers on to the home front as much as into the trenches. A book that’s based at first on her teenage diaries comes to France quite late in the narrative. Peripherally interested in the war, Brittain provides a fascinating picture of a young girl’s tormented coming of age as the long summer of Edwardian England becomes overcast by the storms of total war.

The former suffragette, now equal with the troops, discovers her 'feminism', a word that makes an early appearance here

Brittain is never less than disarmingly frank. “When the great war broke out,” she begins, “it came to me not as a superlative tragedy but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.” She had grown up in Macclesfield and Buxton, in a solid middle-class family, had become a “provincial debutante” in 1912, and was en route to Somerville College, Oxford. Her writing, at this stage, was an “incongruous mixture of war and tennis”. In another life, she might have embarked on a post-Victorian “ladyhood”. But that was not to be: “The train started. As the noisy group moved away from the door, he sprang onto the footboard, clung to my hand and, drawing my face down to his, kissed my lips in a sudden vehemence of despair. And I kissed his and just managed to whisper ‘Goodbye.’”

Falling in love with Roland Leighton, and watching him go off to the trenches, changed everything. The young lovers grew up very fast and when, inevitably, the news came that Vera’s fiance had “died of wounds” just before Christmas 1915, Brittain’s fate was sealed. Now, all her ambitions as a writer were bent towards expressing the agony of her loss.

Brittain’s experience in war becomes emblematic of the slaughter, as her immediate circle is annihilated. After Roland, her beloved brother, Edward, is killed and then two close soldier friends, Geoffrey and Victor (Tah).

“‘Tah – dear Tah,’ I whispered, in sudden pitying anguish, and I took his fingers in mine and caressed and kissed them as though he had been a child. Suddenly strong, he gripped my hand, pressed it against his mouth and kissed it convulsively in return. His fingers, I noticed, were damp and his lips very cold.” (By morning, Victor was dead.)

Vera Brittain on Mrs Pankhurst and feminism: from the archive, 20 June 1928 Read more

Now Brittain enlists as a VAD nurse, tending the wounded in field dressing stations. The former suffragette, now equal with the troops, discovers her “feminism”, a word that makes an early appearance in these pages. Her “study” is no longer a romantic memoir, but almost a campaigning text for the idea that women and men should be treated equally. This was still, even in the 1930s, a provocative idea. It would come as a shock to many of her subsequent readers that women should be free to become university students, independent working women, assertive wives and mothers, public speakers and respected participants in national politics. When Brittain passed on the lessons of her wartime life to her daughter, Shirley Williams, she was handing the torch of early 20th-century feminism to a new generation.

Testament of Youth, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies on publication, had and continues to have its own afterlife. Rediscovered by Virago in the 1970s, it found a new audience and was adapted for television, with Cheryl Campbell playing Brittain. Part of its success, in hindsight, was that it both articulated a longing for women’s liberation while simultaneously celebrating a nostalgic vision of British middle-class comfort in the twilight of the Edwardian age. That dichotomy had been intrinsic to the book long before it was completed.

Brittain’s ambition, she said at the outset, was “to write something which would show what the whole war and postwar period has meant to the men and women of my generation”. Testament of Youth achieves this, then it goes further. It describes one woman’s struggle in the dominantly masculine world of military action and her determination to humanise the experience of being in extremis. It is courageous and honest, a work of literature that fulfilled all its author’s ambitions.

A signature sentence



“For a whole month in which off-duty time had been impossible, I had ceased to be aware of the visible world of the French countryside; my eyes had seen nothing but the wards and the dying, the dirt and dried blood, the obscene wounds of mangled men and the lotions and lint with which I had dressed them.”

Three to compare



Beatrice Webb: My Apprenticeship (1926);

Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928);

Irene Rathbone: We That Were Young (1932)

Testament of Youth is published by Virago (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £8.19