Literatures of the Great War
Term 2, Week 8
English Memoirs
Testament of Youth
‘[D]rawing a picture of middle-class England – its interests, its morals, its social
ideals, its politics – as it was from the time of my earliest conscious memory, and
then telling some kind of personal story against this changing background’ (TY,
Foreword, p. xxv).
‘[T]o tell my own fairly typical story as truthfully as I could against the larger
background, and take the risk of offending all those who believe that a personal
story should be kept private, however great its public significance and however
wide its general application’ (TY, Foreword, p. xxvi).
‘[Brittain] confessed to a male associate who traveled in similar literary circles
that she was working on “a kind of autobiography”. This fellow writer greeted
Brittain’s admission with contempt and remarked: “An Autobiography! But I
shouldn’t have thought that anything in your life was worth recording!”’
(Richard Badenhausen, ‘Testament of Youth’, Twentieth Century Literature, 49: 4 (Winter,
2003), 421-448 (p. 421))
Brittain at Melrose, the family home, in Buxton, 1913
Edward Brittain, Roland Leighton and Victor Richardson
in Officers Training Corps uniform, Uppingham, 1914
Edward Brittain
Roland Leighton
Vera Brittain
Geoffrey Thurlow
Victor Richardson
The Galeka
The Britannic
Imtarfa Military Hospital, 1917
Brittain at Nurses' Quarters,
St George’s Hospital, Malta, c.1916
Brittain with patients,
St George’s Hospital, Malta, 1916
Brittain (third from left) and colleagues,
Near St George's Hospital, Malta, c.1917
Part of hospital complex at Étaples
WAACs tending graves at Étaples
Testament of Youth
‘[Brittain] builds the text around her letters to Roland Leighton, her brother
Edward, & others, as well as letters from those correspondents […] the memoir is
thus overrun with different types of writings, including selections from her
diaries; epigraphic poems by herself and Leighton at the head of chapters; literary
quotations within the body of chapters from renowned writers like Shelley,
Wordsworth, Brooke, Longfellow, Hardy, and Kipling, as well as from more minor
figures; popular verses from English newspapers; the texts of posters and
placards; the words, and sometimes even music, to various songs and marches;
excerpts from sermons, prayers, news headlines & stories, introductions to textbooks, & book reviews; and even scraps of odd documents like “a few pages torn
from a child’s exercise-book that [Leighton] had found in a ruined house, and
appeared to contain some stumbling translations from Flemish into French”’
(Badenhausen, p. 438).
VB thus ‘create[s] a communal conversation about the trauma […] The
[epigraphic] poems foreground an earlier, untraumatized version of herself, and
the prose chapters write against that voice’ (Badenhausen, p. 439).
Testament of Youth
‘Testament directly reproduces some of the less palatable ideologies that helped
to make the VAD institution successful. Katharine Furse, the director, played the
class and educational high standards of the applicants as a trump card against
possible accusations on the part of the military of “unladylike” behaviour. The
result was that not only were women of lower social status excluded from nursing
service, but that they were also encased in an ideological construct that assumed
their moral inferiority. Brittain maintains the discourse of superior sensitivity, and
even uses it to derogate the trained nurses, whom she constructs as envious of
the innate capabilities of the volunteers and, in any case, intrinsically dull. The
literary effect of Brittain’s text has been to promote and validate the woman’s
story of the war. Its political effect has been, in its silent reproduction of the
ideologies exploited by Furse to ensure women’s acceptance near the trenches,
to advance a feminism predicated on an individualism that was available only to
women of a certain class.’
(Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World
War (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 3–4)
Testament of Youth
Some approaches
• ‘[A]utobiographical study’?
• Responsibilities to others’ privacy & sensibilities?
• Social context

Middle-class society

Women’s experience
• Hindsight/later commentary
• New approach to familiar themes

Lack of information; rumour

Propaganda

Non-participants

Lost generation
• Narrator reliable or unreliable?
• Relation to fiction (dramatic/literary effects &c