Testament of Youth : An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925

from brenzi

How fortunate that Vera Brittain lived at a time when people kept diaries and wrote letters because it enabled her to reconstruct, through her correspondence, the years prior to, during and following WWI. And from there she composed and published her fascinating autobiography, Testament of Youth....

from ursula

Vera Brittain tells the story of her young adulthood, which coincided with the outbreak of World War I. I don't think I fully comprehended the description "lost generation" until I read this book. How could these young people, raised in such seemingly sunny conditions and then thrust into the hor...

from tututhefirst

A staggering work of beauty, sadness, insight, introspection, and intelligence, Vera Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth, ended my year of World War I reading on a pinnacle. As a relatively privileged member of pre-war Society (her parents had servants, she had lovely clothes and the opportunit...

from lauralkeet

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. ... What really mattered were not the...

from SheReadsNovels

I don't read many non-fiction books or biographies/autobiographies so this was something different for me. It was fascinating to read a personal account of the effects the war had on one woman's life and on society as a whole. Reading this book made me realise how little I actually knew about Wor...