I'm enjoying this autobiography very much. I would agree that Vera is not the most loveable character in the world. She admits that she has inherited her father's explosive, aggressive personality. How this will affect her later on, I have still to discover though I'm getting some intriguing ideas from the other posts!
For those interested in the way the book was received on publication, the following review appeared in
The American Journal of Nursing, November, 1933.
TESTAMENT OF YOUTH. By Vera
Brittain. 661 pages. The Macmillan
Co., New York. 1933.
Price, $2.50.
THE pages of
Testament of Youth
are packed with drama, the psychological
drama of the effect of "history's
cruelest catastrophe" on a whole
generation.
The author was a V. A. D., serving
in British hospitals in London, Malta,
and France for the greater part of the
war. Out of the depths of this experience,
and of those of a little group of
young men, she, "a surviving victim,"
has created a great book. Her attitude
toward and her discussions of
nursing are based on the same sensitive
feeling for the deeper values of life that
make the book remarkable. Admiring
an occasional individual matron or
sister, she none the less describes nursing
as "a singularly backward profession."
Nurse readers may argue
that she has not given effective evidence
on this point.
Her powers of observation in the
field of actual nursing are indicated in
the following note from her diary when
transferredt o herf irst medicals ervice:
"These acute medical cases were a disturbing
contrast to the sane, courageous surgicals.
Wounded men kept their personalities even
after a serious operation, whereas those of
the sick became so quickly impaired; the
tiny, virulent microbe that attacked the
body seemed to dominate the spirit as well."
The influence of this great book
should be felt in the movement to end
war, although she has written
"It is, I think, this glamour, this magic,
this incomparable keying up of the spirit in
a time of mortal conflict, which constitute
the pacifist's real problem-a problem still
incompletely imagined, and still quite unsolved."