Scan barcode
jesspeachee's review against another edition
4.0
I'm glad I read this. It was something so beyond my comfort zone, close to the first and only memoir I've ever read. Of course the main reason I bought it and started reading it was because of Colin Morgan. He's in the picture below and plays one of Vera's friends Victor Richardson. But I did like this book and will be happy to delve more into why at another time but I'm tired. Goodnight.
ellie_cripps's review against another edition
5.0
This book was a real labour of love for me, partly, yes, because parts were tougher going than others, but mostly because Vera Brittain writes incredibly naturally and confidently about a truly challenging subject. That is the case not only because it is her life, but also because she has a level of perspective that is unreachable by anyone but survivors of her exact generation.
Profoundly moving and openly challenging of limits placed on anyone.
Profoundly moving and openly challenging of limits placed on anyone.
rubyprior's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.25
ca_mila's review against another edition
4.0
A very emotional and touching autobiography. Vera Brittain was truly inspirational.
Read my full review of the book here: https://inkdropsreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/review-testament-of-youth-vera-brittain/
Read my full review of the book here: https://inkdropsreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/review-testament-of-youth-vera-brittain/
elliejefford's review against another edition
3.0
I struggled with what to give this book. It deserved higher I think but I really struggled with the first 100 pages and the last 200 pages. The in between of this though was amazing and I was so drawn to it. It took me over a month to read it which isn’t like me but I do tend to be much slower with non fiction. However, overall, a real reminder of how much that generation went through and a humbling experience
diana_skelton's review against another edition
3.0
"In my later teens, I often used to consider the incalculable advantages of heredity and early environment that are involved in merely being born a member of such [distingushed] families. What really seems remarkable is not that the undistingushed residue produces only half the sum of human talent, but that those who belong to it ever emerge at all from the blackest obscurity."
"A dozen years' periodic observation of Oxford dons has led me to doubt whether, even for those misguided dupes the boys and girls of the War generation, an over-development of the critical faculty would not have been at least as dangerous as its under-development. The latter, at any rate, does nothing to destroy that vitality which is more important than any other quality in combating the obcstacles, the set-backs and the obtuse ridicule which are more often encountered in early youth than at any other time."
"Most people wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality."
"To me and my contemporaries, with our cheerful confidence in the benignity of fate, War was something remote, unimaginable, its monstrous destructions and distresses safely shut up, like the Black Death and the Great Fire, between the covers of history books."
"I don't think I am ever likely to marry as [...] I could not endure to be constantly propitiating any man or to have a large range of subjects on which it was quite impossible to talk to him. [...] I always think of Roland as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but all are in the same key."
"She felt sure I knew as well as she did that if one had an original mind and something of ambition, it was not by poring over books that one grew and developed. One's intellect, she said, could always take care of itself. It was one's personality that counted, and that could be better nourished sometimes in active life than in halls of learning."
"Short of actually going to bed with [the patients], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day – thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy – beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single."
"'You will be amused to hear that I am making myself quite hardened to blackbeetles. Last night when I was washing up cups in the surgical kitchen, they were running about the floor and tumbling over one another in the sink. I didn't run away. I just fatsened my skirt up andd went on wahsing the cups. I consider that as quite the most heroic thing I have done since the War started.'
From trenches in which blackbeetles must have appeared an extremely desirable alternative to their most numerous inhabitants, he replied, ' The sky was wonderful as we came along an hour ago--deep blue with mackerel spots of light gold clouds in the the west meshed like chain armour on a blue ground and below in the horizon a long bar of cloud so dark as to look purple against the sun."
"Sometimes my heart feels very tumultuous, full of passion and fierce desire; at others it is possessed of a sort of blank and dessparing resignation to what feels inevitable."
"The trouble about men's and women's relationships, I concluded self-contemptuously, was never so much adultery as adulteration; love that had once been a torrent flood had meandered through mediocre plains until it had run dry, and lost itself in a limitless desert of sand."
"A dozen years' periodic observation of Oxford dons has led me to doubt whether, even for those misguided dupes the boys and girls of the War generation, an over-development of the critical faculty would not have been at least as dangerous as its under-development. The latter, at any rate, does nothing to destroy that vitality which is more important than any other quality in combating the obcstacles, the set-backs and the obtuse ridicule which are more often encountered in early youth than at any other time."
"Most people wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality."
"To me and my contemporaries, with our cheerful confidence in the benignity of fate, War was something remote, unimaginable, its monstrous destructions and distresses safely shut up, like the Black Death and the Great Fire, between the covers of history books."
"I don't think I am ever likely to marry as [...] I could not endure to be constantly propitiating any man or to have a large range of subjects on which it was quite impossible to talk to him. [...] I always think of Roland as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but all are in the same key."
"She felt sure I knew as well as she did that if one had an original mind and something of ambition, it was not by poring over books that one grew and developed. One's intellect, she said, could always take care of itself. It was one's personality that counted, and that could be better nourished sometimes in active life than in halls of learning."
"Short of actually going to bed with [the patients], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day – thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy – beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single."
"'You will be amused to hear that I am making myself quite hardened to blackbeetles. Last night when I was washing up cups in the surgical kitchen, they were running about the floor and tumbling over one another in the sink. I didn't run away. I just fatsened my skirt up andd went on wahsing the cups. I consider that as quite the most heroic thing I have done since the War started.'
From trenches in which blackbeetles must have appeared an extremely desirable alternative to their most numerous inhabitants, he replied, ' The sky was wonderful as we came along an hour ago--deep blue with mackerel spots of light gold clouds in the the west meshed like chain armour on a blue ground and below in the horizon a long bar of cloud so dark as to look purple against the sun."
"Sometimes my heart feels very tumultuous, full of passion and fierce desire; at others it is possessed of a sort of blank and dessparing resignation to what feels inevitable."
"The trouble about men's and women's relationships, I concluded self-contemptuously, was never so much adultery as adulteration; love that had once been a torrent flood had meandered through mediocre plains until it had run dry, and lost itself in a limitless desert of sand."
sydsnot71's review against another edition
3.0
This was a re-read for me, but I hadn't read it since probably 1990/1991 so I had forgotten much of it. I had forgotten how much of the book covers her life before the war and after. For me it is fixed in my brain as a book 'just' about WW1 and the horrific losses she experienced: her fiancé, her brother and two of her friends. And the grief.
However we get to see life before the war for the middle-class girl with ideas beyond just marriage and children. Brittain wants to be educated and we see her fight to do that and that takes us up to her attending Oxford. But when war breaks out Brittain eventually volunteers to be V.A.D and the book fills in her experiences both as a nurse in the UK and then in France and Malta. Again there are frustrations.
Brittain is also a feminist and her story fills in some of the battles that were fought on that front too. As the war goes on and the losses pile up it is heart breaking and Brittain writes about grief, loss, and guilt very well. When, towards the end of the book, she is about to get married she also talks about whether she is doing the right thing towards the dead.
There's early Labour Party politics, the League of Nations, travelling Europe post-war, including Germany.
It's much more than a WW1 book and that might effect how you respond to it. I enjoyed it on this second reading, but not quite as much as I did the first time.
However we get to see life before the war for the middle-class girl with ideas beyond just marriage and children. Brittain wants to be educated and we see her fight to do that and that takes us up to her attending Oxford. But when war breaks out Brittain eventually volunteers to be V.A.D and the book fills in her experiences both as a nurse in the UK and then in France and Malta. Again there are frustrations.
Brittain is also a feminist and her story fills in some of the battles that were fought on that front too. As the war goes on and the losses pile up it is heart breaking and Brittain writes about grief, loss, and guilt very well. When, towards the end of the book, she is about to get married she also talks about whether she is doing the right thing towards the dead.
There's early Labour Party politics, the League of Nations, travelling Europe post-war, including Germany.
It's much more than a WW1 book and that might effect how you respond to it. I enjoyed it on this second reading, but not quite as much as I did the first time.
edwardian_girl_next_door's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Medical content, Grief, War, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Gun violence, Mental illness, and Sexism
Minor: Sexual harassment
peterp3's review against another edition
5.0
Superb! Vera Brittain has written an extremely powerful memoir of her experience during the First World War - her hopes and dreams and losses. But beware: It’s totally heart-wrenching at times.
The 1914-1918 section is gripping, as expected, but the 1919-1920 section was interesting and surprising how she had to quickly adapt, because no one was interested in her wartime experience.
My own grandfather was the same age as Vera Brittain, and married in the same year, so it was interesting to compare his memoirs of the same years 1895-1925 (which I’ve just edited and published) with hers.
The 1914-1918 section is gripping, as expected, but the 1919-1920 section was interesting and surprising how she had to quickly adapt, because no one was interested in her wartime experience.
My own grandfather was the same age as Vera Brittain, and married in the same year, so it was interesting to compare his memoirs of the same years 1895-1925 (which I’ve just edited and published) with hers.