This poignant work collects letters written from 1913 to 1918 between Vera Brittain and four young men - her fiance Roland Leighton, her younger brother Edward, and their two close friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow - who were killed in World War I. While this correspondence inspired Testament of Youth, Brittain's classic memoir of her wartime experiences, most of the letters are published here for the first time.
This collection of Vera Brittain's poetry and prose, some of it never published before, commemorates the men she loved - fiancé, brother and two close friends - who served and died in the First World War. It draws on her experiences as a VAD nurse in London, Malta, and France, and illustrates her growing conviction of the wickedness of all war. Illustrated with many extraordinary photographs from Brittain's own albums, and edited with a new introduction by Mark Bostridge, BECAUSE YOU DIED is an elegy to men who lost their lives in a bloody conflict, and a beautiful volume of remembrance to mark the anniversary of the Armistice.
"In this book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in over fifty years, Mark Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw significant new light on this extraordinary woman's life and character. By disentangling elements of myth from the reality, Bostridge has written a vivid and readable account of one of the most iconic figures in modern British history."--Jacket
From Normandy to the Caribbean Islands, this innovative biographical pursuit follows Adèle Hugo on her reckless journey of unrequited love – and the writer who chased after her a century later.
The events set in motion by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 changed many lives irrevocably. For Vera Brittain, an Oxford undergraduate who left her studies to volunteer as a nurse in military hospitals in England and France, the war was a shattering experience; she not only witnessed the horrors inflicted by combat through her work, but she lost the four men closest to her at that time--her fiancé, Roland Leighton, brother Edward, and two close friends, Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Nicholson, who all died on the battlefield.<p> <i>Letters from a Lost Generation</i>, a collection of previously unpublished correspondence between Brittain and these young men--all public schoolboys at the start of the war--chronicles her relationship with them, and reveals "the old lie," the idealized glory of patriotic duty that was soon overtaken by the grim reality of the Flanders trenches. The letters are lively, dramatic, immediate and, despite the awfulness of war, curiously optimistic: "Somehow I feel the end is not destined to be here and now. We have not fulfilled ourselves--and someday we shall live our roseate poem through," wrote Vera in one of her last letters to Roland in December 1915, just days before he was killed by a sniper's bullet. Following his death, and later those of their mutual friends Victor and Geoffrey, Vera's letters take on a new, raw intensity as she concentrates all her emotions on her brother--a hero awarded the Military Cross--until his death on the Italian Front in June 1918. These letters formed the basis of Vera Brittain's remarkable autobiography, <i>Testament of Youth</i>, and vividly bring to life the voices of the lost generation whose words threaten to be lost forever as the First World War recedes even further from living memory. <i>--Catherine Taylor, Amazon.co.uk</i></p>