Vera Mary Brittain (29 December 1893 – 29 March 1970) was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, writer, feminist, socialist 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. Life and work Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brittain was the daughter of a well-to-do paper manufacturer, (Thomas) Arthur Brittain (1864–1935) and his wife, Edith Mary (Bervon) Brittain (1868–1948). Her father was a director of family-owned paper mills in Hanley and Cheddleton. Her mother was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, the daughter of an impoverished musician, John Inglis Bervon. When she was 18 months old, her family moved to Macclesfield, Cheshire, and ten years later, in 1905, they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire. Growing up, her only sibling, her brother Edward, nearly two years her junior, was her closest companion. From the age of 13, she attended boarding school at St Monica's, Kingswood, Surrey where her mother's sister, Aunt Florence (Miss Bervon) was co-principal with Louise Heath-Jones, who had attended Newnham College, Cambridge. After two years as a 'provincial debutante', Brittain overcame her father's objections and went up to Somerville College, Oxford to read English Literature. By this time war had broken out and Brittain had become close to one of her brother's friends from Uppingham School, Roland Leighton. Finding her Oxford studies increasingly an irrelevance as her male contemporaries volunteered for war, she delayed her degree after one year in the summer of 1915 to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse for much of the First World War. She served initially at the Devonshire Hospital in Buxton, and later in London, Malta and in France where she was stationed close to the front at Etaples and where she nursed German prisoners of war, a significant staging post on her journey towards internationalism and onto pacifism. Roland Leighton, who became her fiancé in August 1915, close friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, and finally her brother Edward were all killed in the war. Many of their letters to each other are reproduced 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 war. Returning to Oxford in 1919 to read history, Brittain found it difficult