A review by ditten
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

Testament of Youth is an incredible memoir by Vera Brittain, who worked as a VAD nurse during WWI, and who lost the four men closest to her in the war, including her beloved brother Edward, and her fiancé Roland.

 

This is the first female memoir of the time I've read, and the most well-known, and Brittain's writing is incredible. The book is beautiful, incredibly sad, and thought-provoking. 
Published in 1933, VB had enough time post war to be able to contemplate and put into perspective not only her own experiences but also her contemporaries', and the war itself, while still seemingly remaining mostly faithful to describing her life as she experienced it in the moment, many years earlier. This was in large part done with the aid of her saved diaries and correspondences.

 

VB's memoir centers around the war, its consequences, love, and loss. She also includes a few years of her post-war life, starting her writing career, her work with peacebuilding, and becoming a feminist. It's clear how these experiences and values influence her book, and helps her contextualize the war and its consequences.

 

It does feel particularly upsetting to be reading VB's account of war, and her hope and ideas for how war might be avoided in the future in a book published in 1933, the year Hitler was appointed chancellor, and just a few years prior to WWII.

 

Testament of Youth moved me to tears several times, and while a long read that at times did feel drawn out, I highly recommend it. 

 

Some of my favourite quotes:

 

"There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past."

 

"It was best, after all, that our dead who were so much part of us, yet were debarred from our knowledge of the post-war world and never even realised that we ‘won’, could not come back and see, upon the scarred face of Europe, the final consequences of their young pursuit of ‘heroism in the abstract’. How futile it had all been, that superhuman gallantry! It had amounted, in the end, to nothing but a passionate gesture of negation - the negation of all that the centuries had taught themselves through long æons of pain."

 

"At every turn of every future road I shall want to ask him questions, to recall to him memories, and he will not be there." (on her brother Edward while visiting his grave in Italy in 1921)

 

"Perhaps, after all, the best that we who were left could do was to refuse to forget, and to teach our successors what we remembered in the hope that they, when their own day came, would have more power to change the state of the world than this bankrupt, shattered generation. If only, somehow, the nobility which in us had been turned towards destruction could be used in them for creation, if the courage which we had dedicated to war could be employed, by them, on behalf of peace, then the future might indeed see the redemption of man instead of his further descent into chaos."