I am reading the book in parallel with a collection of her poems and prose,
Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After edited by Mark Bostridge (who started as a research assistant for her daughter and became a biographer and recognized authority on Vera Brittain). I have been somewhat obsessed with war poetry this year. I found it interesting that Vera said poetry was the only form of reading that she could really embrace during the war. The poetry is sometimes school-girlish. On the other hand some are especially beautiful and poignant when reinforced by inside knowledge of the event gained from reading the book, for example May Morning about Oxford. The prose is from articles that she wrote mostly after the war. There are also loads of great photographs interspersed throughout.
I liked this news article by Mark Bostridge. It is about the process she went through to develop
Testament of Youth and the accuracy of the text compared to her sources. Apparently she stopped keeping a diary after 1917 and the chronology gets a little fuzzy and events embellished a little for their emotional impact.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/200...ardianreview18
I am nearly 50% complete and for some reason am so captivated that I feel a bit like Virginia Woolf that I can't put the book down. I have this restless desire to keep reading!
Quote:
|
Although she mocked Brittain's 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" - she admitted that the book kept her out of bed until she'd finished reading it, and later wrote to Brittain about how much Testament had interested her. Woolf's interest in the connections that Brittain had "lit up" for her between feminism and pacifism would leave its mark on the novel she was then writing that would eventually become The Years, and even more on the radical analysis of Three Guineas.
|