Vera Brittain

Vera Mary Brittain (29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse, writer, feminist, and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. 2Life and work Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brittain was the daughter of a well-to-do family who owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton. She was the daughter of a paper manufacturer, Thomas Arthur Brittain (1864-1935) and his wife, Edith Bervon Brittain (1868-1948), and her only brother was her closest companion. When she was 18 months old, her family moved to Macclesfield, Cheshire, and when she was 11 they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire. From the age of 13, she attended boarding school at St Monica's, Kingswood, Surrey where her aunt was the principal. Overcoming her father's initial objections, she studied English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, delaying her degree after one year in the summer of 1915 to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse for much of the First World War, initially in Buxton and later in London, Malta and France. Her fiancé Roland Leighton, close friends Victor Richardson M.C. and Geoffrey Thurlow, and her brother Edward Brittain M.C. were all killed during the war. Their letters to each other are documented in the book Letters from a Lost Generation. In one letter Leighton speaks for his generation of public school volunteers when he writes that he feels the need to play an 'active part' in the wa