Vera Brittain

(1893 - 1970)

A socialist, feminist, pacifist, and author of twenty-nine books, Vera Brittain attended Somerville College, Oxford, in 1914. The following year she deferred her degree to serve as a nurse during World War I. She wrote of her experience and the wartime deaths of her brother, fiancé, and two friends in her first memoir, Testament of Youth. After the war she returned to the University of Oxford, where she befriended novelist Winifred Holtby, whom she memorialized in her 1940 book, Testament of Friendship. She published a third memoir, Testament of Experience, in 1957.