Vera britain autobiography of benjamin franklin

Her best-selling memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism. 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 Brittain was 18 months old, her family moved to Macclesfield , Cheshire , and 10 years later, in , they moved again, to the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire.

As Brittain was growing up, her only sibling, her brother Edward , nearly two years her junior, was her closest companion.

Vera britain autobiography of benjamin franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

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 Roland Leighton , one of her brother's friends from Uppingham School. Finding her Oxford studies increasingly an irrelevance as her male contemporaries volunteered for war, Brittain delayed her degree after one year in the summer of to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment VAD nurse for much of the First World War.

While stationed close to the front at Etaples, her experience nursing German prisoners of war significantly influenced her journey towards internationalism and pacifism. 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 to read history, Brittain found it difficult as "a war survivor" to adjust to life in postwar society.