TESTAMENT

OF YOUTH
An Autobiographical Study
of the Years 19001925

Vera Brittain
With an Introduction by Mark Bostridge,
a Preface by Shirley Williams and
an Afterword by Kate Mosse

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First published by Victor Gollancz Limited in 1933

This edition published in 2014
by Phoenix,
an imprint of Orion Books Ltd,
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martins Lane,
London wc2h 9ea
An Hachette UK company
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright Mark Bostridge & Timothy Brittain-Catlin,
Literary Executors of Vera Brittain, 1970
Preface copyright Shirley Williams 1978
Introduction copyright Mark Bostridge 2009
Afterword copyright Kate Mosse 2013
The right of Vera Brittain to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the copyright owner.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
isbn 978-1-7802-2659-0
Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Bridgwater, Somerset
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy
All photographs are reproduced by permission of
William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections,
McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
The Orion Publishing Groups policy is to use papers that
are natural, renewable and recyclable products and
made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging
and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to
the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

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Afterword
I cant remember now, precisely when I first read Testament of Youth.
With all significant books, we cast our eyes back wanting the
moment itself to be memorable, special. But the best books those
that will keep us company for longer than the days spent reading
them take time to make their mark, to sink in. But I do remember
the sun and sitting outside, cross-legged on the grass, reading.
I remember the emotion and the disbelief as, one by one, those
closest to VB were lost her fiance, Roland, her brother, Edward,
their friends, Georey and Victor (Tah). I remember the cover of
the Virago Classic and felt a frisson of connection, an imagined
fellow-feeling, when places I knew were mentioned. And though
the book had been recommended (background reading for History
A level and to supplement the volumes of war poetry studied on
the English syllabus), I remember thinking even then that Testament
of Youth the first in a trilogy of Vera Brittains autobiographical
writings wasnt background reading, but rather a book that stood
at the heart of things. Some eighty years after first publication, it
still does.
It was in Testament of Youth that I first came across the word
feminism, the idea that women and men should be treated equally,
that opportunities available for the one should be available for the
other. It was in these pages that I read about how VB and likeminded fellow-travellers campaigned for womens surage, girls
education, for female students to be granted degrees, to serve their
country, to be able to marry and work, to speak in public and
contribute to political life. Here too, ruminations about the ways
in which aairs of the heart and aairs of the head might be in
collision. The loss and the folly of it all, the pity of it.
Reading it again some thirty years later, I am reminded of the
things I valued about the book the first time around. But now, even

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more, Im struck by how it is also a book about writing and

becoming a writer: pamphlets, poetry, fiction, biography, history
too. In these pages, VB is generous to writers of her generation
so many quoted within the pages and with such admiration: Olive
Schreiner and Rose Macaulay, Hilda Reid, Dorothy L. Sayers,
Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, L.P. Hartley, Brooke and
Rostand and Masefield, Sassoon and Hodgson. From the first pages,
writing is at the heart of things: letters, that regular exchange of
emotions and information that kept friends and family in touch
with one another; snippets from articles and journalism, as well as
many of her most iconic, most mournful poems from the
collection Verses of a V.A.D. to the plangent elegy On Boars Hill,
October , to the passionate anger of The Lament of the
Demobilised. Her first attempts at fiction and her delight in the
success of her friend Winifred Holtby.
Brittain is a writer with great descriptive powers too, both of
place and emotion the sinking of the Brittanic, the ship on which
shed travelled to Malta in ; the cold and damp of the shabby
boarding house in London; the sickening horrors of Boulogne and
the field hospital at E taples; the wrecks and drownings; thoughts
of the shattered, dying boys she nurses; her inability to adjust to
the brightly lit, alien world of England post ; her visit to her
brothers grave on the Asiago Plateau; and, the final lines of the
book, her feelings when seeing her husband-to-be George, G
disembarking the ship at Southampton, that come with the hope
that she might, now, be able to escape the wreckage of the past.
Even the genesis of Testament of Youth itself gives an insight into
how a book comes into being. Published seventeen years after VB
first expressed her intention to commit her experiences to paper,
she came to realise that stories so often choose their own shape. In
the end, she realised that only the truth would do, it could not be
fictionalised or disguised, for fear of robbing it of its power.
Testament of Youth is a beautiful book, a thought-provoking
book, a clever book. A book about war and the consequences of
war, about love and the consequences of love, about writing and
responsibility and duty. It is as relevant now as it was on its
first publication. But more than anything, Testament of Youth is a
reminder of the power of the written word that helps us hear and
listen and see things with the benefit of hindsight. This might

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be one womans autobiography, but, at the same time, it stands

testament to the experiences of an entire generation of women and
men, their children and their childrens children.
Kate Mosse
November

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