**Giving a voice to a lost generation, this edition features a new
introduction by Brittain's biographer. Now a major motion picture
starring Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Hayley Atwell, and Taron
Egerton
**
Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera
Brittain's elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for
memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her
studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services,
Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war's
end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is
both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished
generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Suplement as a book that
helped "both form and define the mood of its time," it speaks to any
generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.
This edition features a new introduction by Brittain's biographer
examining her struggles to write about her experiences and the book's
reception in England and America.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of
classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700
titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works
throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the
series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and
notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as
up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
