Contents
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
To
R.A.L. and E.H.B.
In Memory
And some there be, which have no memorial; who are
perished, as though they had never been; and are
become as though they had never been born; and their
children after them. But these were merciful men, whose
righteousness hath not been forgotten... Their bodies
are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.
The people will tell of their wisdom, and the
congregation will shew forth their praise.
ECCLESIASTICUS XLIV
The opening page of chapter 1 from the holograph manuscript of
Testament of Youth (William Ready Division of Archives and Research
Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada)
Introduction
On 28 August 1933, Testament of Youth, Vera Brittains classic memoir of the cataclysmic effect of the First World War on her generation, was published by Gollancz to a generally enthusiastic reception and brisk sales. Oh what a head-cracking week..., Brittain recorded in her diary, after reading the early reviews. Never did I imagine that the Testament would inspire such praise at such length, or provoke - in smaller doses - so much abuse.
Several of the original reviewers, though, were unnerved by the autobiographys frankness. James Agate struck a blow for misogyny when he wrote that it reminded him of a woman crying in the street. However, in her diary, Virginia Woolf expressed the more widespread response. Although she mocked Brittains story - how she lost lover and brother, and dabbled hands in entrails, and was forever seeing the dead, and eating scraps, and sitting five on one WC
For Vera Brittain, the publication of Testament of Youth represented the crossing of a personal Rubicon. Approaching forty, she had at last passed from relative obscurity to the literary fame she had dreamed about since childhood, when as a girl she had written five novels on waste-cuts from her fathers paper-mill. In the process she had exorcised her brutal, poignant, insistent memories of the war, releasing her deeply felt obligations to her war dead: her fianc Roland Leighton, shot and fatally wounded at Christmas 1915; her brother Edward, killed in action on the Italian front just months before the Armistice; and her two closest male friends, Victor Richardson, shot through the head and blinded at Arras, who survived for a matter of weeks until June 1917, and Geoffrey Thurlow, killed in an attack on the Scarpe earlier that spring.
Brittain had been attempting to write about her experiences of the war, during which she had served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse in military hospitals in London, Malta, and close to the front line in France, for more than a decade. In 1922 she had selected and typed sections of the diary she had kept from 1913-1917, and submitted it for a prize offered by a firm of publishers for a personal diary or autobiography.
By the middle of February 1933, she had completed her manuscript, but other problems soon became apparent. In the final stages leading to publication, she was confronted by the strong objections of her husband, the political scientist George Catlin, to his own appearance in the books last chapter. Catlin scrawled his comments in the margins of the typescript: intolerable, horrible, pretty terrible. She complied by reducing him to a more shadowy figure in the final draft, though she bitterly regretted that the theme of her post-war resurrection, symbolised by her marriage, had been irretrievably weakened.
Testament of Youth underwent its own remarkable resurgence in the late seventies, almost a decade after Brittains death. Brittain had been heartened by the assessment of Oliver Edwards (nom de plume of Sir William Haley) in The Times in 1964, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, that Testament of Youth was the real war book of the women of England. However, she had believed in her final years that as a writer she was largely forgotten, and that any future interest in Testament of Youth would be of only a minor kind. She would certainly have been surprised by the extent of the books renewed success after it was reissued in 1978 by a feminist publishing house and adapted as a landmark BBC TV drama. Carmen Callil, head of the nascent Virago Press, found herself weeping while reading it on holiday in her native Australia, and back home propelled the book once more to the top of the bestseller lists; while the five-part television adaptation in 1979, with a luminous performance by Cheryl Campbell in the central role, and an intelligent script by Elaine Morgan, introduced Brittains story to a wider audience than ever before. It has never been out of print since.
Today, Testament of Youth is firmly enshrined in the canon of the literature of the First World War. It remains the most eloquent and moving expression of the suffering and bereavement inflicted by the 1914-18 conflict, as well as offering generally reliable testimony of a VAD serving with the British army overseas, And in the books final section, after the declaration of the Armistice in November 1918, and following the granting of the vote to women over thirty in February of that year (an event that passed unnoticed by Brittain at the time because of her absorption in her work as a nurse in France), Testament of Youth returns to feminist themes: to Brittains post-war involvement in equal-rights feminism, to her working partnership with her great friend Winifred Holtby and, finally, to her engagement to a survivor of the war generation, and the promise of a marriage that will be defined in feminist terms.
More insidiously, though, Brittains autobiography dramatises a conflict between a pre-war world of rich materialism and tranquil comfort and the more liberated society that developed partly as a consequence of the war. Its avoidance of modernist idioms seems to underline this, while the autobiographical figure of Brittain herself embodies a central paradox: that though she proposes a form of egalitarian marriage and other radical reforms, and despite the fact that she envisages herself as a modern woman, she remains at heart a product of her Victorian bourgeois background.
For an understanding of Testament of Youth in a broader context, the book needs to be viewed as one of the large number of womens autobiographies and biographical histories published in the twenties and thirties, which attempted to reconstruct and assess the pre-war period and the years between 1914 and 1918. Works like Beatrice Webbs My Apprenticeship (1926), Ray Stracheys The Cause (1928), Sylvia Pankhursts The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Helena Swanwicks I Have Been Young (1935), adopted what had hitherto been a predominantly masculine form of writing in order to celebrate the achievements of womens public lives. Vera Brittain, too, was concerned to place on record the unsung contribution of women to the war effort, though, ironically, much of the confidence and assurance of her autobiographical voice emanates from her passionate identification with her young male contemporaries and her experience of living vicariously through them. But in keeping with her fundamental belief in the influence of worldwide events and movements upon the destinies of men and women,
