Recommendations from our site
“I have read all three of her memoirs and this one is by far the best. She gave validity to what it was like to be a woman in the First World War. That was a very important thing that she did at the time — because this book came out in 1933. Poets and others had written about what it was like to be a man in the trenches and I think there was a feeling, ‘Well, women weren’t in the trenches, so how dare women talk about what it was like?’ Nothing could rival the pain that men suffered. But what she showed is that women suffered their own pain, which was a different sort of pain. What she really puts across is the agony of just waiting, waiting, waiting, and the incredible sense of helplessness that women had.” Read more...
Dorothy Byrne, Journalist
“Testament of Youth is simply one of the finest, most heart-rending and most moving memoirs – not just of the Great War, but of any conflict…Over the course of the war, Vera becomes a nurse and goes from being this protected middle-class Edwardian girl to dealing with the dead and the dying for months on end. She would lose, one by one, her two best friends from university, her fiancé, and finally her brother. Testament of Youth is really the most powerful account of that transformation from innocence to experience and her transformation, of course, in so many ways echoes that of Britain itself.” Read more...
The best books on Legacies of World War One
Wade Davis, Anthropologist
