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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.
mary_juleyre's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Besides the horrors and tragedies of WWI, which Miss Brittain experienced as nurse in Malta and the front in France, also a powerful manifesto of Feminism and women's access to academia at Oxford, bravo Vera!
paola_mobileread's review against another edition
4.0
I always thought of Testament of Youth as a war book, but this book is in fact much more than that - yes, the central part of the book (which consists of three parts) does recount Vera Brittain's first hand experience of the Western Front, where she served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, but this is also in fact the watershed between the society that was before, and the society to come after.
Surely Vera Brittain wasn't the only girl brought up in a wealthy upper middle class by Victorian parents whose wishes to see their daughters married well clashed with an inquisitive young mind's desire to do something other than fulfill their supporting role of mothers and wives in a male dominated society. But hers was the first generation of young women who could fill the vacuum created by the mass conscription of males to seize opportunities never before available.
The first two parts of the book are heartwrenching, her description of the war and of its consequences, of the shattering of the dreams and the lives, of the hopes, the portrat of the realization of the futility of it all are described incisively and beautifully. But besides the emotions stirred by this book, to me it is unashamedly feminist - though an uncommon sort of feminism, as class seeps through it. For instance a not yet 22 years old Vera returning home after seeing her fiance going off to the front complains that
I have to agree with Mark Bostridge who in the introduction to the Penguin Classic edition writes
But I disagree with the scolding tone implied in this judgment: it must have been a Herculean task to go so much against the tide in those days. She was on a mission, with her future husband also recognising and accepting that her work was more important to her than marriage. We don't see much of "G.", but that little we see is rather impressive, and one can't discount the importance of his support (and, I suspect, that of several maids!) in helping her carry out her project.
Surely Vera Brittain wasn't the only girl brought up in a wealthy upper middle class by Victorian parents whose wishes to see their daughters married well clashed with an inquisitive young mind's desire to do something other than fulfill their supporting role of mothers and wives in a male dominated society. But hers was the first generation of young women who could fill the vacuum created by the mass conscription of males to seize opportunities never before available.
The first two parts of the book are heartwrenching, her description of the war and of its consequences, of the shattering of the dreams and the lives, of the hopes, the portrat of the realization of the futility of it all are described incisively and beautifully. But besides the emotions stirred by this book, to me it is unashamedly feminist - though an uncommon sort of feminism, as class seeps through it. For instance a not yet 22 years old Vera returning home after seeing her fiance going off to the front complains that
Though the three maids had been unoccupied all evening, not one of them offered to help me unpack or to get me a cup of tea, and I was far too much absorbed in my misery to ask them for anything. It is 1915, but considering the book was written much later and this is not an excerpt from her diary at the time, it does sound an off note.
I have to agree with Mark Bostridge who in the introduction to the Penguin Classic edition writes
though she proposes a form of egalitarian marriage and other radical reforms, and despite the fact that she envisages herself as a modern woman, she remains at heart a product of her Victorian bourgeois background, and though to a lesser degree to his consideration that
much of the confidence and assurance of her autobiographical voice emanates from her passionate identification with her young male contemporaries and her experience of living vicariously through them.
But I disagree with the scolding tone implied in this judgment: it must have been a Herculean task to go so much against the tide in those days. She was on a mission, with her future husband also recognising and accepting that her work was more important to her than marriage. We don't see much of "G.", but that little we see is rather impressive, and one can't discount the importance of his support (and, I suspect, that of several maids!) in helping her carry out her project.
dnandrews797's review against another edition
4.0
While I read this in fits and starts, putting it down for a time when the plot would slow down, I think it’s a excellent novel about World War I from a perspective not often covered in war novels: that of women. Brittan’s struggle in her role as a nurse and her loss of most close friends, fiancée, and her brother is written about in beautifully tragic prose that really conveyed the magnitude of her loss and disillusionment characteristic of this time period. Though it slowed down towards the beginning and a bit at the end, overall it was a lovely experience and oddly relatable in these trying times.