Testament of Lost Youth

The Early Life and Loves of Vera Brittain

Kathryn Ecclestone

• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781399036672
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Vera Brittain is one of the twentieth century's most significant feminist and pacifist figures. Her 1933 best-selling First World War memoir, Testament of Youth, is acclaimed as one of the most important autobiographies of the last hundred years. Testament of Lost Youth is the first book to examine Vera's cossetted middle-class upbringing in once-fashionable Buxton, between 1905 and 1915. She condemned her 'provincial young ladyhood' with remorseless fervour, but were her criticisms justified, or is there a more complex, nuanced story? Drawing on Vera's own diary, letters, and a wealth of historical sources, Kathryn Ecclestone uncovers the hidden layers of Vera's privileged early life. Her book challenges traditional portrayals to shed new light on the unique social atmosphere of Edwardian Buxton, Vera's schooling and experience of university, her family, social and love life, before a harrowing journey through the First World War, where she lost her fiancé, adored brother and many friends and acquaintances. From her intellectual awakening to her battles against societal constraints, this book, filled with images of Vera and her family, presents a nuanced exploration of a remarkable woman, revealing how her early life shaped and inspired the icon the world came to know.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ‘We Went to Buxton in the Motor’
• Chapter 2 ‘A Mentally Voracious Young Woman’
• Chapter 3 ‘That Other Side of Myself, the Frivolity I Hold So Dear’
• Chapter 4 ‘Oxford! What It Doesn’T Call up to Mind!’
• Chapter 5 ‘This House of Many Comforts’
• Chapter 6 ‘A Good Strong Splendid Man, Full of Force & Enthusiasm … There Must be Such!’
• Chapter 7 ‘More Influence upon Me for Good and Strength than Anyone’
• Chapter 8 ‘A Terrible Moment When the Great Movements of the World Enter like an Earthquake’
• Chapter 9 ‘A Nature Restless with Search and Strife’
• Chapter 10 ‘Oxford I Trust Will Lead to Something, but Buxton Never Will’
• Chapter 11 ‘The Day Will Come When We Shall Live Our Roseate Poem through as We Have Dreamt It’
• Chapter 12 ‘I Found a Lot of Old Dance Programmes Which I Tied up and Put Away’
• Chapter 13 ‘I Say Goodbye to All I Care For’
• Chapter 14 ‘A Provincial of the Provincials, in Heart Though Not in Mind’
• Chapter 15 ‘Where the Tawny Crested Plover Cries’
• Vera Brittain’s Life – A Brief Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography