Books by Vera Brittain
Vera Brittain (1893-1970) was a novelist and nurse, best known for her searing memoir of World War I, Testament of Youth (also turned into a movie in 2014).
“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
Interviews where books by Vera Brittain were recommended
Five Memoirs by Women, recommended by Dorothy Byrne
We have much to learn from the lives of women who came before us, says Dorothy Byrne, the British TV journalist and producer who is now president of a women’s college at the University of Cambridge. She recommends five of her favourite memoirs, all by women and notable for their searing truthfulness about everyday life.
The best books on Legacies of World War One, recommended by Wade Davis
The explorer and author of Into the Silence, Wade Davis, tells us that the consequences of the Great War were much more than merely political. He says the war had a noticeable impact on exploration, arts and literature, and modernity itself.
