Vera Brittain (1893–1970) grew up in a prosperous family in Buxton, Derbyshire, and won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1914. She left to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in England, Malta and France during the First World War, in which her fiancé, her brother and two close friends were killed. After the war she became a journalist, novelist, feminist and committed pacifist. Her daughter is the politician Shirley Williams.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
