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

In 1915 Vera Brittain abandoned her studies at Oxford to enlist as a nurse in the armed services. Before the war was over she had served in London, Malta, and close to the Western Front in France-and she had lost all the men she loved. Out of that experience came this cauterizing book, at once a memoir and an elegy for the bright, passionate generation who came of age on the eve of the war and vanished in its trenches.
Moving, sweeping, and one of the greatest accounts of war ever written, Testament of Youth captures the politics, hopes, and despair of Brittain and her peers. In his Introduction, Brittain's biographer Mark Bostridge examines Brittain's struggles to turn her experiences into a book and shows why her work continues to speak to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.