Testament of Youth, Testament of Friendship, and Testament of Experience by Vera Brittain

First published:Testament of Youth, 1933; Testament of Friendship, 1940; Testament of Experience, 1957

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1893-1950

Locale: England, France, Malta, Scandinavia, Germany, the United States, and India

Principal Personages:

• Vera (Mary) Brittain, the author, a pacifist and a feminist
• Edward Brittain, her brother, a war casualty
• Roland Leighton, her fiance, a war casualty
• George Catlin, her husband
• Winifred Holtby, her closest friend
• John Catlin, her son
• Shirley Catlin, her daughter

Form and Content

The three autobiographical books written by Vera Brittain owe their popularity to the fact that they represent more than personal history. They are interpretations of a time when a secure old world was dying and a cruel, horrifying new era was being born. As a young woman who lost those she loved in World War I, who dedicated herself to the causes of pacifism and feminism after the war, and who then survived World War II, once again to plunge into the fight for peace and for the rights of women, Brittain represents the victories and defeats, the hopes and fears of her generation.

Testament of Youth covers the period from Brittain’s birth in 1893 to her marriage in 1925. It is a book of 662 pages, with acknowledgments and a foreword by Brittain. Later editions include a preface by the author’s daughter, Shirley Catlin Williams, which stresses the importance of the work as the only representation of World War I written by a woman and also as a book describing the death of an era. The twelve chapters are separated into three unequal parts, each of which ends with a milepost in Brittain’s life—her fiance’s death, the end of the war, and finally, her marriage.

The thematic development of Testament of Youth is indicated by the epigraphs which introduce each part of the book and each chapter. The initial epigraph, a segment of a fairy tale, is repeated at the end of the later book, Testament of Experience, which takes Brittain’s life from 1925, the year of her marriage, to 1950. In Testament of Youth, however, it is the epigraphs preceding the chapters that are particularly moving, because all of them are quotations from poems either by Brittain herself or by her brilliant and doomed fiance, Roland Leighton.

Although it is somewhat shorter (480 pages), the third of Brittain’s autobiographical works, Testament of Experience, repeats the format and the subject matter of her first book. Again, her personal life is dominated by the love of a man, her husband, George Catlin (referred to as “G.”); again, her public life is dedicated to the struggles for women’s rights and for peace; again, Brittain and those she loves, her husband and her two children, are endangered by war, just as her fiance, her brother, and her close friends had been in Testament of Youth.

The structure is almost identical to that of Brittain’s first autobiographical volume. After a foreword, there are twelve chapters, grouped into three unequal parts, each of which ends with an important event. The first part takes the author from her marriage to the beginning of World War II; the second, to the end of the war; and the third, on travels throughout the world, ending in London with Brittain once again in the arms of her husband.

Testament of Experience repeats the pattern of epigraphs preceding each part and each chapter. These epigraphs, however, vary greatly in form. There are lines from letters by G. or by Brittain, segments of poems or prose by the author, and—when the writing and publication of Testament of Youth is described—even a book-jacket blurb by Brittain’s friend Winifred Holtby.

The second autobiographical work, Testament of Friendship, is different both in subject matter and in form from the other two volumes. While each of them concentrated on Brittain’s attempt to survive a war and to be reunited with those she loved, in this book the threat comes from disease, which did indeed bring death to Brittain’s closest friend, Holtby, when she was only thirty-seven.

Testament of Friendship covers a sixteen-year period, beginning with the initially hostile meeting between Brittain and Holtby at postwar Oxford and ending with Holtby’s death in 1935. It covers some of the same time period as Testament of Youth, which ends in 1925, and Testament of Experience, which begins in 1925, and therefore it deals with some of the same events. In this volume, however, Brittain’s perspective is different: She considers such events in her life as her relationship with G., her marriage, and her motherhood not in themselves, but as they affect and are affected by her friendship with Holtby. Furthermore, she shows the parallels between Holtby and herself, both of whom were torn between art and activism and both of whom, as women, were also torn between their desire to devote themselves to the men they loved and their need to realize their own potential.

Because the analysis of this relationship is so detailed, it is not surprising that Testament of Friendship is 442 pages in length, about the same as Testament of Experience, which deals with twenty-five years instead of sixteen. The book is divided into twenty-three chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue.

Like the other books, Testament of Friendship is elegiac in tone. Yet Testament of Youth and Testament of Experience derive their elegiac tone less from the descriptions of personal loss (though both do contain such passages) than from the evocation of the end of an era. In Testament of Friendship, the elegiac tone arises from the fact that the book is a tribute to a friend and an expression of personal grief at her loss, not in a cataclysm, but through disease.

Critical Context

For a long time, Vera Brittain was noted chiefly as the author of Testament of Youth, generally agreed to be the best, if not the only, account by a woman of the spiritual and psychological effects of World War I. Critics pointed out Brittain’s own insistence that her life was typical; by studying it, they could understand both her generation’s initial idealism, even gullibility, and its postwar disillusionment.

Testament of Friendship was generally regarded as interesting, but inferior to Testament of Youth; Testament of Experience brought mixed reviews. Many critics believed that it lacked the single focus of Testament of Youth; they resented Brittain’s assumption that readers would find the details of her marriage and her travels as interesting as the significant observations on world affairs which she interspersed. Others, however, found Testament of Experience important because it did reveal a life that was whole. It might be argued that Brittain’s later autobiographical book was intended to show a merging of idealism with reality, a reconciliation of the artistic and social selves, and, above all, a proof that marriage and motherhood need not negate a woman’s being but can instead deepen her understanding of life. Even though Testament of Youth will probably always be ranked as Brittain’s finest work, her story is incomplete without those two books in which she illustrates the triumph of hope over despair.

Bibliography

Chambers, Peggy. “Vera Brittain,” in Women and the World Today, 1954.

Delany, Paul. “Playing Fields, Flanders Fields,” in London Review of Books. January 21-February 3, 1982, pp. 22-23.

Gray, James. “Hypatia at the Helm,” in On Second Thought, 1946.

Haig, Rhondda Margaret. Leisured Women, 1928.

Haig, Rhondda Margaret. This Was My World, 1933.

Mellown, Muriel. “Vera Brittain: Feminist in a New Age,” in Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers, 1983. Edited by Dale Spender.

Ringel, Fred J. “The ‘Lost Generation,’” in The Nation. CXXXVII (October 18, 1933), pp. 454-455.