Vera Brittain's Testaments of Labor, Work, and Action

Abstract

Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933), amemoir of her childhood and experience as aVoluntaryAid Detachment (VAD) nurse in the FirstWorldWar, offers valuable insight into the ways in which the war changed the conditions, representations, and political implications of English women’s labor. Throughout the memoir’s three sections, Brittain retrospectively explores what her own labor meant, both in personally coming to terms with her exceptional losses (her fiance, brother, and two close friends were killed in the war) and with women’s larger political and cultural position in England. Despite its centrality to Testament of Youth, however, few scholars have engaged with Brittain’s representations of labor. In this essay, I will argue that Testament of Youth importantly exemplifies the three categories of labor, work, and action HannahArendt would later define in The Human Condition (1958), specifically illuminating how they applied to English women’s experiences in the years surrounding the war. Furthermore, Brittain’s memoir engages such