CORNISH: Brittain's years as a nurse caring for dying British and German soldiers woke her antiwar consciousness. It is testimony to her beliefs and values. From "Testament Of Youth" to her breakthrough performance as a sleek robot in "Ex Machina," she's having a banner year. DOMINIC WEST: (As Mr. Brittain) Oh, here we go. Rebecca West wrote that it was "a vivid testimony". Growing up in a conservative middle-class family in Buxton, Derbyshire, she writes unapologetically about her own ambitions to better herself, and wins an exhibition to Oxford despite her parents' traditional ideas about a woman's place being in the home. And I was like, why don't you do your own accent? Vikander is Swedish. "You just feel this journey she's going on," says Walter. It was written by a young woman named Vera Brittain who had served as a nurse tending to gravely wounded servicemen in World War I. She never lived to see the extraordinary resurgence of her most famous work. When I came to write my own second novel, Home Fires, in which a young girl struggles to cope with her father's return from the front, Brittain's memoir was my first port of call. Edward showed very few true academic talents. She has an eye for the telling detail that helps the reader to understand the trauma she experiences. Vera Mary Brittain (29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, writer, feminist, socialist, and pacifist. But aged just 21 she signed up to be a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Brittain never got over his loss. She was physically exhausted, stricken with grief and in a near-constant state of heightened nervous apprehension. Of culture, sport, art and life imitating it. Her radiant happiness got across to my mother.". It is the kind of small incident that anyone can understand – and yet it elucidates something much more profound. And I was like, I don't know what my own accent is 'cause I wasn't born with this language, and because of the work I do, I kind of have to change all the time. And I wanted to kind of bring that. When it was finally published in August 1933, the book was an instant hit. In doing so, she laid out her political beliefs. nurse. He was killed at the age of 20 by a German sniper while repairing barbed wire on a moonlit night in a stretch of no man's land. She was drawn back to Brittain because of her "unapologetically intellectual ambition. Nicholas Eden-Green, whose mother Winifred was Brittain's secretary for more than 20 years, recalls that by the mid-1950s: "I got the feeling that Vera Brittain had grown a bit, not sour exactly, but saddened by the fact that she wasn't the popular figure she once was. Those women who lost their sons, who sent their sons away – it was just accepted. Because of its autobiographical nature, many of the novel's themes are beliefs and themes of Vera's. And she was honest… as blazingly honest as anyone can be". When Brittain's fiance was killed just before Christmas 1915, she had been expecting him home on leave. But I was amazed how into her emotions and feelings and how true she was telling her own experience and story. Nursing before the death of her fiancé, Roland Leighton, was an effort for Brittain to contribute to the war in order to be closer to Roland. With the outbreak of the second world war, Brittain's pacifist philosophy fell out of favour. Vera Brittain’s 1933 memoirs, Testament of Youth, focus mainly on the years 1914-1925. Testament in this context is about the growing awareness of war from the perspective of a young woman. In Testament of Youth, the words seemed to pour out of her, a potent mixture of rage and loss, underpinned by lively intelligence and fervent pacifist beliefs. Occasionally Winifred [Holtby, a lifelong friend and collaborator, and the author of South Riding] could make her laugh, but Winifred was a radiant personality and someone who could enjoy life a lot of the time. The book effectively covers three parts of Brittain’s life as a young woman; the years just before the War, the years during, and the years just after, especially her time as a V.A.D. She poured her energy into campaigning against apartheid, colonialism and nuclear proliferation. CORNISH: Alicia Vikander says her performance required a physical transformation. Feb 10, 2012 - Vera Brittain - WWI nurse, sister, fiance, memoirist (Testament of Youth) Although Brittain never believed she would find happiness in a relationship after Roland's death, she did eventually marry the philosopher and political scientist George Catlin in 1925 after a courtship initiated by letter. In fact, it later emerged that she was listed in the notorious Nazi "black book", which detailed notable people to be arrested in the event of a successful invasion of Britain by Hitler. English Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, writer, feminist, socialist, and pacifist. She relayed her own life story – first as the daughter of a provincial paper factory owner who struggled to emancipate herself, then as a young woman trying to make sense of the personal ravages wreaked by war. In the same year, Winifred Holtby, who lived with the family in Chelsea and who had become the children's surrogate aunt, died of Bright's disease. “Testament of Youth was written by Vera Brittain, 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. She describes how the … It's based on a famous antiwar memoir published in 1933. VIKANDER: (As Vera Brittain) And all this time, you said you couldn't afford for me to go. How did George Catlin find it, knowing that his wife had been in love with another man? But her activism also came from deeply personal losses. VIKANDER: I remember someone told me that they had seen a very old interview on YouTube, and they were like, but you sound American in that. The new film "Testament Of Youth" takes a different view. Then the war broke out, and suddenly, she actually gave up, in one way, her biggest dreams because she felt like she, like all the men and all the other - most of young people at that time in England, you know, she wanted to actually do something. It wasn't until the late 70s, after her death, that the feminist publisher Virago reprinted Testament of Youth and a hugely popular television series brought the work to a wider audience. ... She joins the war efforts as a nurse after a year of school. CORNISH: Several filmmakers are signing up Alicia Vikander for exactly that chameleon-like ability to disappear in her roles. "It should probably be in a museum somewhere. The actual experience of writing the book we now know as Testament Of Youth, (which she started writing in November 1929 and finished in the spring of 1933), was a searing one, not only because the process of remembering very painful things was obviously difficult to deal with, but also because she was trying to build a family and build a marriage at the same time. nurse in Malta in her seminal memoir, Testament of Youth (1933). Her beloved brother, Edward, had been seriously injured in the battle of the Somme. And they were like, why have you changed? "That's Edward's violin," she says, gesturing to a battered instrument case on top of a bookshelf. It is an autobiographical account of her experiences. The Sunday Times called it "a book which stands alone among books written by women about the war". I think that's an outrage, myself. One of her two closest male friends, Geoffrey Thurlow, had been wounded at Ypres. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1893– 1970) has endured as this British author’s best known work. His one true passion was music, but Mr. Brittain thought music was a feminine subject and career. This paper takes an in-depth look at the life of feminist Vera Brittain through analyzing her autobiography, Testament of Youth. As a woman, Brittain was arguably the first to blend emotional resonance with intellectual clarity. For one thing, her husband had to cope with reading his wife's impassioned reminiscence of her former love. Brittain was indeed one of the only writers of her time able to chronicle the female experience of war with such visceral force. Testament of Youth. And I've read about in school, and I've seen documentaries and films. I try to drink it but fail ignominiously." It had wider implications too. In 1916, Vera Brittain was 22 years old. The deaths of her father and her closest friend forced Brittain once again to shoulder the weight of tragedy. One of her two closest male friends, Geoffrey Thurlow, had been wounded at Ypres. "You feel empathy with Vera Brittain," says Walter. "She found me and my older brother [John] a bit of a distraction," says Williams, 82, when we meet in her Westminster office. A memoir on how her life, and that of her generation, were forever marked by the losses endured as a result of World War I, it is indeed a touching testament. She never gave up on that at all. Testament of Youth, often hailed as the story of a lost generation, is the autobiographical account of one young woman's life during WWI. ALICIA VIKANDER: (As Vera Brittain) Please don't keep things back from me, Roland, with an idea of sparing my feelings. I wonder if, at some level, the capacity for finding things funny had been battered out of her? I think you feel the same when you see these people dying in Iraq. Even now, eight decades after its publication, it continues to inspire a new generation. According to Mark Bostridge, this meant that their fledgling romance was necessarily heightened: "By the end of it, they were looking at each other almost as fictional representations," he says. She postpones her academic studies to work as a nurse during wartime. She realised she'd never get any more than that from me. Testament of Youth Published in 1933, the first instalment of Vera Brittain’s memoirs went on to become one of the seminal first-hand writings on World War I, providing the framework for one woman’s harrowing, life-affirming coming of age story. When the war breaks out, she rages against the injustice of it and, frustrated by her own powerlessness, volunteers as a nurse in order to make a difference. It's a legacy that would have surprised Brittain herself. It was written by a young woman named Vera Brittain who had served as a … Testament of Youth does indeed possess a significant difference of tone from books by male memoirists. The new film "Testament Of Youth" takes a different view. The other, Victor Richardson, was fighting in the trenches in France. Still, her reputation as a writer never regained the popularity it had enjoyed when Testament of Youth was first published. The imagined holds far greater terror for me. Many contemporaneous accounts portrayed women as victims who endured the shattering impact of world events, rather than as agents of their own change. At the close of publication day, its first print-run of 3,000 had sold out. There were further blows to be suffered. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. We've lost a bit of that in feminism… We need to reclaim it.". Leighton emerges from the pages of Testament of Youth as a glamorous, heroic figure, an idealistic public schoolboy who was captain of the Officers' Training Corps at Uppingham School before signing up at the outbreak of war. It has often been assumed that Holtby and Brittain were lesbians because of their unconventional living arrangement. WEST: (As Mr. Brittain) No, I can't afford to waste money, no. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. It's one of the sad things about her literary career that she never lived to see the success of Testament of Youth.". So I had to kind of remind myself to be really young and naive and think that the world is ahead of you and you can do anything. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. CORNISH: The role of Vera Brittain in "Testament Of Youth" is Alicia Vikander's biggest international role to date. It was only when she decided to write as herself that her authorial voice seemed to flow and the events she had endured were given a poignant immediacy to which readers could relate. There was almost nothing else available that conveyed the personal devastation of the first world war from a young woman's point of view with such candour. Feminism: Throughout her early life, Vera was ultimately told that she was inadequate because she was a woman. CORNISH: The film opens before the war with a teenage Vera swimming in the English countryside. "I think what is different about Testament of Youth, what has made it last, is that it does two things simultaneously," says Brittain's biographer and literary executor, Mark Bostridge. Walter first read Testament of Youth at school but returned to it later in life when she was researching her 2010 work Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. VIKANDER: I remember when I read the book, I mean, I knew the facts of the war. VIKANDER: And suddenly, I realized if you just - if you do your best and try to get the language right in English, you suddenly have a chance to do work in so many other countries and on such a bigger scale. They're often about heroism, brotherhood and perseverance. It's a fitting word for a woman who survived, and whose life's work was dedicated to honouring the memory of those who, tragically, did not. That really made me feel the bigger picture. Watch. Accuracy and availability may vary. She was 76. The gossip about their sexuality was, Williams writes in her autobiography, "deeply resented" by Brittain, who believed it was "a form of anti-feminism to the effect that women could never be real friends unless there was a sexual motivation, while the friendships of men had been celebrated in literature from classical times". A final segment of memoir, to be called 'Testament of Faith' or 'Testament of Time' was planned by Brittain but remained unfinished at her death. "After the war, she couldn't really think of humour for a long, long time. See more ideas about first world, wwi, world war i. Her fiancée Roland Leighton, two close friends, and her brother Edward Brittain were all killed in the war. Oxford student Vera Brittain postpones her studies to serve as a nurse during World War I. When she died, in 1970, she believed, according to Bostridge, "that her reputation was at the lowest ebb it had ever been. Shirley Williams, who was born in Chelsea in 1930, three years before Testament of Youth was published, recalls her mother sticking to a punishing writing routine: sitting down at her typewriter at 10am, having already dealt with her correspondence and bills; at 2pm taking a break when she would lead the children around Battersea Park and recite the Latin names of the birds and flowers; then back to her desk until dinner time. Her beloved brother, Edward, had been seriously injured in the battle of the Somme. ", For the author and feminist Natasha Walter, it is Brittain's ability to weave the political into the personal that makes her memoir so riveting. "To some degree I suppose it had the impact it did because of the anguish in it, which so many women must have felt," says Callil. Whereas a writer like Edmund Blunden tries to evoke the senselessness and confusion of … It remains deeply influential. ", At the same time, Brittain believed keenly that she had not fulfilled her ambitions to be a great novelist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. The film was directed by James Kent and written by Juliette Towhidi. "She tells it with incredible immediacy… It all comes through in this torrent of force and personal power. After writing that letter to her brother, Brittain took the best part of 17 years to complete the manuscript. Her political activism had a lasting impact on her daughter. It helped, perhaps, that both Brittain and her husband were such committed pacifists and therefore had a common goal to work towards. In one scene, she confronts her parents when they buy her yet another expensive present. "She had no idea that she was going to be a permanent figure in the literary canon," says Williams. In Testament of Youth, the words seemed to pour out of her, a potent mixture of rage and loss, underpinned by lively intelligence and fervent pacifist beliefs. "Brittain wasn't going to put up with it. The couple had two children, the youngest of whom, Shirley, is the Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Williams of Crosby. The building was also the hospital where Vera Brittain served as a nurse and described in her memoir Testament of Youth. She was saying: 'This is awful.' Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth", an autobiographical memoir of her service as a nurse in the First World War, was controversial when it first appeared in 1933, largely because it was written from a pacifist viewpoint and rejected the official British position that we had been fighting a … However, more than eighty years after it was written, there are no doubt younger people who have never heard of it and older people who have it gathering dust on one their shelves – … Vera Brittain while serving as a V.A.D. ", As a child, Williams was only too aware of the ghosts of her mother's past. When the second world war broke out, Brittain's critics accused her of collaborating with the Nazis because of her anti-war stance, and the sales of Testament of Youth dropped off. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. The film opens in the U.S. this weekend. Both her fiance and her brother were killed, and in the film, she rallies her countrymen to remember the personal cost of war. Brittain's father, unable to recover from his son's death, committed suicide by jumping into the Thames in 1935. It got better as she began to realise I was going to survive.". The writing of such a powerful memoir did not come without personal anguish. VIKANDER: (As Vera Brittain) Perhaps their deaths have meaning only if we stand together now and say no - no to killing, no to war, no to the endless cycle of revenge. Although Brittain is no longer alive to witness it, her book has shaped the consciousness of modern-day feminists. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. The war taught her that you could not live your life in isolation from public events. First she made several attempts at fictionalising her wartime experiences without much success. Her fiance, Roland Leighton, had been killed on the western front the previous Christmas. Her fiance, Roland Leighton, had been killed on the western front the previous Christmas. Apr 18, 2017 - Explore Lisa Dornell's board "Testament of Youth" on Pinterest. The literary editor and author Diana Athill wrote in a 2009 article for the Guardian that Brittain "was brave, and her strong feelings would always express themselves in action. "I think so," Williams agrees. And it's true that, feminism aside, Brittain's writing is deeply accessible. Vera Brittain and her brother Edward, 1915. The film stars Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain, an independent young woman who abandoned her studies at Somerville College, Oxford, to become a war nurse. She documented her experiences as a nurse, in her autobiography “Testament of Youth”. The story takes place in 1914, right before the beginning of the first World War. But when she writes, the feelings always come first – which may be why the book remains so popular. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The Testament of Youth Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. VIKANDER: I also, you know, am about eight years older than what Vera was in the beginning of this film. "Tough," Williams admits. This book is great and painful, a memoir by Vera Brittain, the English writer, mostly a wartime memoir based on her experiences during the First World War Britain was an Oxford student when World War I began, volunteered as a nurse and was a witness on the vicious war and its victims, lost two of her loved ones her brother and fiance Camberwell - Wikipedia Vera Brittain lists "numerous copies of Blackwood's Magazine" among her literary possessions in her description of her time as V.A.D. A dramatization of Vera Brittain’s 1933 autobiography Testament of Youth—a memorial to a generation devastated by WWI— chronicles her experiences as a nurse in … In her World War One memoir, Testament of Youth, Brittain depicts her experience as a nurse in a way that contradicts the public perception of nursing during the time and suggestively argues in favor of feminism and pacifism. Testament of Youth, the new film adaptation of Vera Brittain’s memoir about her experiences as a nurse in the first world war, is now on general release.. When it was later published in America, the New York Times reviewer wrote that Brittain's autobiographical account was "honest… revealing… heartbreakingly beautiful". She wrote Testament of Youth as a cry of outrage and agony, so that the futility of their deaths would be remembered. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. My mother kept everything. Instead of receiving a call to confirm his arrival, she was telephoned with news of his death. But in many ways, it was simply that Holtby was able to provide the supportive companionship Brittain had once so valued in her beloved elder brother, Edward. By contrast, Brittain's feminism courses through her memoir. In Testament of Youth she writes that, in the weeks after his death, a series of disconnected pictures rolled through her mind: "A solitary cup of coffee stands before me on a hotel breakfast-table. "If the war spares me," Brittain wrote to her brother in a letter that year, "it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four.". Until Testament of Youth appeared, the literary memorialisation of the first world war had been mostly the preserve of the male voice (Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden) or of sentimental novelists who gained short-lived commercial success. n 1916, Vera Brittain was 22 years old. He was a very understanding man.". Roland, Edward, Victor and Geoffrey "were as familiar to me as my brother and living friends", she says. "It moves and it educates.". VIKANDER: She fought to get into Oxford, and she wanted to study English. A film adaptation co-produced by BBC Films and starring Saoirse Ronan, who won an Oscar nomination for her role in Atonement, is in development, and the book seems to strike a chord with contemporary readers who have themselves lived through an era of renewed conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. The writing of Testament of Youth – and its success on publication – did not just affect Brittain herself. Yet amid the chaos and trauma of war, the seed of an idea was planted in her mind. With a dead person, who died at the peak of their youth, they become frozen in aspic. By wars end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. It would later become Testament of Youth, one of the most famous memoirs of the 20th century, and this year marks the 80th anniversary of its publication. I think she felt she didn't get the recognition she wished.". Eighty years on, it remains one of the most moving books ever written about the damage of war and its continuing personal cost. And, you know, she spoke before thinking, and she was quite pigheaded.

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