Reviews for Testament of Youth

The average rating for Testament of Youth based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-10 00:00:00 Christopher Arzola It's another irony of that most ironic of conflicts that the greatest account of how 1914-18 was lived comes not from a male writer out of the trenches, or from some politician familiar with the negotiations, but instead from a middle-class girl from Derbyshire who experienced the war first as a waiting fiancée and later as a volunteer nurse. Vera Brittain grew up in Buxton, where her father owned a couple of paper mills; she was close to her musical brother, had a growing romance with one of his schoolfriends, and fought with her family to be allowed to go to university. Her provincial childhood was characteristic of a rather staid but untroubled Edwardian society which offered few opportunities for intelligent women. Then, when she was 20, came the world war. The careful attempt in Testament of Youth to recreate this context - the book begins in the nineteenth century and doesn't end until the 1930s - is what makes it such a powerful read. When the war comes, it is seen not as some isolated ordeal of shelling and trenches, nor as a political collapse - but as the Apocalypse for an entire society that was already struggling with class relationships and gender imbalances, and whose failure to address these issues was in fact central to the way it faced military conflict. It's hard to write about this memoir objectively because reading it is such an emotional experience. Day after day it left me drained and speechless, partly in sympathy with the losses she suffered and partly in admiration at her technique. Her narrative voice is absolutely flawless; she finds a dry, amused tone which is drenched in a kind of sad wisdom and which positions her squarely in a tradition of English irony that I adore. She can be very funny when she needs to be, and she does not over-egg the moments of high drama, well aware of when bare facts will do the job. Throughout the book there is a profound sense of authorial control that I only feel with the greatest writers. Certainly the way she evokes the experience of those left behind during the war, especially women, is nowhere done better. Her use of contemporary diaries and letters allows her to recreate with extraordinary effect the 'prolonged apprehension', the mental strain, of constantly waiting for telegrams or letters from the front to learn whether one's friends and family are still whole or not. ('Even now,' she comments, writing in 1933, 'I cannot work comfortably in a room from which it is possible to hear the front-door bell.') As her brother, her fiancé and her friends all troop off to fight, Brittain realises that she is suffering, 'like so many women in 1914, from an inferiority complex'. This is something that many female writers of the time have tried to analyse - I kept going back to a poem called 'Drafts' by Nora Bomford (in Scars Upon My Heart): So dreadfully safe! O, damn the shibboleth Of sex! God knows we've equal personality. Why should men face the dark while women stay To live and laugh and meet the sun each day. But no one has made me feel the psychological outrage of this as well as Vera Brittain does here, not even Rebecca West. Desperate to do something, she drops out of her hard-won course at Somerville College, Oxford, in order to enrol as a VAD, where she works first in London, then in Malta, and finally in France. The stark realities that nursing represented for a sheltered, middle-class girl are brilliantly evoked - this was a time, she points out, when 'all girls' clothing […] appeared to be designed by their elders on the assumption that decency consisted in leaving exposed to the sun and air no part of the human body that could possibly be covered with flannel'. Now here she was stripping men naked, treating venereal disease, and mopping up blood, pus and vomit for twelve hours a day. Sex was not, I think, a strong force in Vera Brittain's life, at least her early life as described here; she was not very interested in boys growing up, and her attraction to her fiancé Roland was primarily an artistic and intellectual one - they had got engaged almost without having experienced any physical contact at all. Given this complete anatomical ignorance, of a kind now hard to imagine, it is all the more astonishing to read such sensitive passages as the following, which I found extraordinarily moving: Short of actually going to bed with [the patients], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day - thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy - beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single. In the early days of the War the majority of soldier-patients belonged to a first-rate physical type which neither wounds nor sickness, unless mortal, could permanently impair, and from the constant handling of their lean, muscular bodies, I came to understand the essential cleanliness, the innate nobility, of sexual love on its physical side. Although there was much to shock in Army hospital service, much to terrify, much, even, to disgust, this day-by-day contact with male anatomy was never part of the shame. Since it was always Roland whom I was nursing by proxy, my attitude towards him imperceptibly changed; it became less romantic and more realistic, and thus a new depth was added to my love. What I want to draw attention to here, beyond the emotional impact, is the fact that in 1933 there was really no established prose convention under which women could write about men's bodies in this way; Brittain is forging this language for the first time, and that's something she succeeds in doing at many points throughout the book. It is one of the most striking implications of her wonderful (and wonderfully undoctrinaire) feminism that she is determined to say what is unsaid, and more importantly to explain what is insufficiently understood, about women's experiences of the war and of social pressures in general. This is not to say that she neglects how her male friends experienced the war - quite to the contrary, she is committed to understanding and memorialising what she memorably calls 'the tragic, profound freemasonry of those who accepted death together overseas'; but by focusing elsewhere she somehow makes it more profound and tragic than I've ever felt it before. The sense of clear-eyed realism that characterises Brittain's descriptions is reinforced by her rejection of any religious comfort. Her spiritual beliefs constitute a kind of questing agnosticism (informed in part by Olive Schreiner's 1883 novel The Story of an African Farm, which was a keystone book for her and Roland). But she is convinced that death is final; and at times, when she is thinking about interpersonal duties and responsibilities, she is very inspiring on this subject: And then I remembered, with a startling sense of relief, that there was no resurrection to complicate the changing relationships forced upon men and women by the sheer passage of earthly time. There was only a brief interval between darkness and darkness in which to fulfil obligations, both to individuals and society, which could not be postponed to the comfortable futurity of a compensating heaven. It's very affecting to see her reach for these lessons in the latter parts of the book. It would have been easy to start this book in 1914, end it in 1919, and make it a true war memoir. That is not enough for her; it doesn't do the job. She keeps going, through the 'numb disillusion', through the 'indictment of a civilisation', on through the 1920s and into the 1930s, until she reaches a point where she can start to say, This is where I might be able to go next. This is where society might be able to go next. The whole thing is a colossal achievement, hugely upsetting, but hugely inspiring. It blew the back of my head off. It really should be read.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-07 00:00:00 John Green Where to start? I started reading Testament of Youth mainly for the information on WW1, not knowing that apart from suffering heartbreaking losses and being a VAD nurse, Vera Brittain also was a feminist of the first hour and a writer of great astuteness. In consequence she proceeded to reduce me to openmouthed admiration as early on as her description of youth and life prior to the Great War. Never before have I truly understood the massive societal changes wrought upon people during that short phase of time. Brittain writes so that you are there *with* her, that inevitably you get reminded of your grandparents and their often tentative and still excruciatingly backward stance in many personal matters. Never before was I able to appreciate what it truly meant to have no privacy, at all, to be directed in every manner by parents and their peers. Brittain made it accessible to me, by giving me such simple signposts as e.g. the fact that no woman was ever private, to herself and alone except very early in the morning and late in the night. That indeed a lot of women didn't rise very early because they had to, but because they cherished those few moments they could have to themselves. Nor did I truly grasp what it might mean to an 18 year old VAD nurse to be thrust into a ward filled with men and having to tend to their most private needs, oftentimes themselves. Up to then any middle-class girl wouldn't have been aware of male anatomy, yet suddenly she would have to deal with helping arm-amputated to take a leak and perforce also discover the pure plumbings of the male sexuality and what it might mean in terms of her later duties as a wife. It made me finally understand some things discussed with friends who grew up in extremely repressed households. Her descriptions of budding love, of Roland, Victor and Geoffrey, and of course her brother Edward, and her unconventional approach to these men, were sweet and all the more ingenious to read when juxtaposed to their later letters from the front depicting how much they changed or wrestled with what they considered their duty. *That* also was something I, a post WW2 child with a sound hatred of warfare, finally grasped, which was so utterly heartbreaking because it meant that so many, many gallant young men on any of the sides had been viciously misled. I could go on and on, especially as I have read, prior to this, enough factual books on WW1 to know just what horrors she was so calmly writing about. A feminist, a pacifist and yet she still managed to display that special kind of stiff upper lip which was and is particular to the British middle and upper classes. She slips but rarely, this here I consider such a slip: I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy War, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case--to say nothing of 10 cases--of mustard gas in its early stages--could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes--sometimes temporally, sometimes permanently--all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke. For a brief moment that stiff upper lip slips and she lets us see the horror thrust upon her. By the end of the war she had lost everything dear and close, her beloved fiancé, her brother, her best friends. Brittain convincingly writes about the schism which separates the post-war self from her pre-war self, one which is likely to mark almost everyone of that generation. A note of warning: I cried a lot, for all those young men, for their lovers, sisters, mothers, for the poor men feeling they let down their country and peers because they had to stay at home, for a generation of women confronted with a future alone. At times I was unable to keep going, simply because I was unable to breathe, I was so clogged up from crying. But I'd inevitably come back to the book, pressing on, reading on, wishing to learn where it all ended for her. What to me, child of those who fought and survived in WW2, was the worst was knowing that she was writing this in 1933, just a few months before everything started off again, to the same if not worse result. I very much recommend this book for a personal look at this war, for insights which you won't find in the usual books written by men and less feministic women and for a close look at what it meant to be a woman born in the Victorian era.