Testament of Youth; Introduction by Maddy Coelho

Vera Brittain's book was discussed at the Book Club's meeting on Monday 20 October. This book was the choice of Maddy Coelho, who kindly provided a copy of her introductory remarks:


"Testament of Youth was published in 1933, the first instalment in the memoir of Vera Brittain who was born in 1893.  It depicts the life of an ordinary, or perhaps not so ordinary, middle class young woman, living through an extraordinary time in history. The two main themes in the book are the impact of the First World War and feminism.  The interaction between these is made clear from the striking understatement of the very first sentence of the first chapter:

“When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.”

So what were these ‘personal plans’?  In the two or three years leading up to the war, Vera’s ambitions have revolved mainly around achieving what she considers to be a ‘proper’ education, at Oxford, equal in quality and status to her brother Edward’s.  More conventionally, she also begins a romance with one of Edward’s Uppingham contemporaries, Roland Leighton.

But of course the advent of the war does interrupt these personal plans.  After a year at Oxford, Vera abandons her studies to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse in London, Malta and France.  From this she gains a first-hand understanding of the impact of the war on both the soldiers, allies and enemies, and also on the civilians left behind.  The visceral horrors of front-line fighting are in stark contrast to the Brittain family’s middle-class problems with servants and rationing and Vera is positioned awkwardly at the juxtaposition between the two.

The general horrors of the war are, however, overshadowed by Vera’s more personal tragedies.  Roland, now her fiancé, dies at Christmas 1915.  From that moment on, there seems to be a sense of the inevitable – for both her and us, the readers – of just waiting for a similar fate to befall Edward.  Sure enough, in June 1915, he too is killed in action, just a few months before the end of the war.  And her two closest male friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, also die.

After the war, Vera returns to Somerville to complete her degree, but a sense of disillusionment and anti-climax casts a shadow over this achievement, which, just five years previously, had appeared to represent the pinnacle of her ambition.  We sense her quite remarkable and admirable eagerness to spend the rest of her life engaging with the real world, far from the dreaming spires.  And so the remainder of the book covers the beginning of her career in journalism, writing for Time and Tide and lecturing for the League of Nations and developing a strong ideology founded on socialism and pacifism.

In the introduction, Brittain describes how she originally intended to write of her experiences as a novel but was unable to achieve the necessary objective distance from the subject.  She then tried to publish her original diary from the war years with fictionalized names, but this also proved unworkable.  It is interesting to speculate on why the final format did work better than the first two.  The author’s stated intention was to make her story “As truthful as history, but as readable as fiction”.  Did she achieve that aim?  After reading the first reviews of Testament of Youth, which sold out its first print-run of 3,000 copies on publication day, Brittain wrote “Oh what a head-cracking week… Never did I imagine that the Testament would inspire such praise at such length, or provoke – in smaller doses – so much abuse.”  Eighty-one years on, at the centenary of the outbreak of the war which lies at the heart of this remarkable book, what acclaim – and criticism – would we lay on it today?"