When reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, I think perhaps the most interesting element we see is the amount of psychological depth that she displays as a writer.  The book describes her time during WWI, but it was actually written years after the events happened.  Brittain corroborates her own story with a wealth of quotes from her own collection of letters (specifically, ones from and to her fiancé) and her own diary which, in my opinion, make her writings much more grounded and believable.  For a long time, I have wondered just how honest autobiographies can really be, given that we tend to tell our past experiences in somewhat self-favoring ways. 

Additionally, Brittain’s writing pulls off something quite incredible that we don’t see in a lot of the literature that comes out of WWI: we see how and what people thought while the war was going on.  We read great works of literature like The Waste Land, The Sun Also Rises, and others, and as we read them, we get a great view of the terrible psychological aftermath of the war.  However, we don’t get as strong a sense about what people thought during the actual war itself.  I also think, as scholars of the arts, that it is lucky that we got this great autobiography from a perspective of a fellow studier of the arts.  Vera Brittain studied literature, her fiancé was an aspiring poet whose family had been around the literary scene of London, and her brother was an amateur composer. 

Some specific sections that I would like to call attention to are scenes like page 158 where Roland discusses his fear of the war never ending: “‘It would be just part of the irony of life if I don’t come back, because I’m such a lover of peace,’ he declared, ‘but I can never imagine the end of the War or what it’ll be like; I believe now it’ll last for years and I’ve no notion what I would do if it were ended.’”  In this section, we see the despair of a soldier who has already realized that the war won’t “be over by Christmas.”  Throughout the reading, we see how both Brittain and Roland change due to the harsh nature of the war.  Vera gets sick for a few months while working exhausting hours in the hospital, and Roland begins to change in the trenches.  Brittain’s discussion of these changes shows us how a mere month or two can radically affect a person’s psyche.  On page 215, she displays her fears that Roland will quit caring about her due to his time on the front: “Was it, I wondered, because Roland had lost interest in me that this anguish of drifting apart had begun—or was the explanation to be found in that terrible barrier of knowledge by which War cut off the men who possessed it from the women who, in spite of the love that they give and received, remained in ignorance?  It is one of the many things that I shall never know.”  It is in these sections that we get the moment-by-moment thoughts of those who were living during the war, rather than just seeing the trauma after it.