Vera Brittain

Vera Brittain wrote Testament of Youth, the most widely read English account of the First World War from a woman's perspective. Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1893 into a prosperous paper-manufacturing family, she fought her parents for an education and won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford in 1914. She left after a year to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, working in London, Malta and at a field hospital in Étaples in France, where she nursed German prisoners. The war killed everyone close to her. Her fiancé Roland Leighton was shot by a sniper in December 1915. Two close friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, were killed in 1917. Her brother Edward, who had been decorated at the Somme, was killed on the Italian front in June 1918, four months before the armistice. She returned to Oxford to read history, unable to relate to students who had not been through it, and formed a friendship with Winifred Holtby that sustained her. Testament of Youth, published in 1933 after several failed attempts at fiction, sets the losses within an argument about the war itself and about the gap between those who fought and those who did not. It sold in very large numbers and has not been out of print. She became a lecturer for the League of Nations Union and then a committed pacifist, joining the Peace Pledge Union in 1937. Her opposition to the area bombing of German cities in Seeing Through the Clouds in 1944 was deeply unpopular and put her on a Nazi arrest list at the same time. Her daughter was Shirley Williams. She died in 1970.

• Lived: 1893 CE – 1970 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer, nurse, pacifist