Peripherally interested in the war, Brittain provides a fascinating picture of a young girl’s tormented coming of age as the long summer of Edwardian England becomes overcast by the storms of total war. A book that’s based at first on her teenage diaries comes to France quite late in the narrative. A modern classic, Testament of Youth is both an elegy and a memoir, a book for all seasons that would have a remarkable literary afterlife in the 1970s and 1980s.īrittain’s “autobiographical study” (she would never allow “autobiography”) takes her readers on to the home front as much as into the trenches. After much redrafting in various genres, including fiction, it was the success of Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929) that showed Brittain the way forward, creatively. Brittain’s is one of several memoirs inspired by the fighting in Flanders, but it made a lasting impact through the raw passion of its anti-war message and its rather modern confessional candour. Testament of Youth was written by a woman approaching 40 who had spent some 17 years coming to terms with her singular experience of the first world war – as a girl, a fiancee, a feminist, a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse and, finally, as the sorrowing victim of intolerable grief.
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