Vera Brittain was a woman born to fight for what she believed in, and no other time could have been more suitable for her to live on Earth than the first half of the 20th century.Comfortably middle-class, smart and pretty, she was perfectly suited for private schooling and subsequent package of marriage, children and suburban society till the end of her complacent life, if several things did not interfere.

First, Vera herself. Even though she took some pleasure in the thrills of bourgeois society, it is obvious through her writing that she was also conscious of its imperfections. She wanted education, possibilities, and independence, in the times when such ambitions were not considered to be admirable, but rather strange. It didn’t help that her brother Edward, on the pure principle of gender, had it all handed to him quite easy – their parents assumed he would go to university, but resisted when Vera asked for the same. She kept nagging her dad about Oxford and a degree in English, and finally he gave in. Vera attended Somerville College before the war started.

Second, she met a person who didn’t find her ambitions appalling. Roland Leighton, whose poems feature frequently in the book, was her brother’s close friend and somewhat of a role model. He and Vera just started getting to know each other as Roland went to the war front. Brilliant, idealistic young man he did all he could to get there as soon as possible. Their love grew over the letters and poems they wrote to each other, as well as the infrequent meetings whenever he could get leave. These dates were much bittersweet, for they never knew if they would meet again. AAs Roland wrote to Vera, after saying goodbye at the train station, it felt as if someone uprooted his heart to see how it was growing.

Third, it was war that brought forward emancipation for women and many aspects of their everyday goings had ‘begun to modify convention’. Joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), providing field nursing services, Vera was hoping to share the burden and heroism of the war with her fiancé, her brother, and her friends who were all fighting at the French front. However, as she brings to light pages from her diary at the time, it is clear that she also wanted to prove many things to herself: that she could be independent, that she would build character, and that she wanted to put some sense into the ignorant provincial girl that was one day more impressed with her purchase of ‘a little black moire and velvet hat trimmed with red roses’ than with the news of 1914 German raid.

She joined the war as an idealistic patriot, but the horrors she saw over time, the suffering it brought to people and to her personally, made her question the very core of it. Through the loss of her friends and through her work as VAD, she was freed from idealistic romanticism experienced at the beginning and left with a desire to understand how and why it had been possible for all the bright young people of her generation to be ‘used, hypnotised and slaughtered’, through their own ignorance and someone’s ingenuity.

Vera is not the most talented writer, if we were talking about linguistics. She tends to overwrite, at the same time it feels like every word has been considered a hundred times before being written, which ruins the flow. However, she has a more important talent  that makes reading her book worthwhile – a talent for remaining detached, to be the objective witness of facts and feelings. It made her ask the right questions which led her to work for the League of Nations, to visit the ‘defeated’ countries in the aftermath of war, and to wonder how anyone ‘should like being a conquered people’. Despite the losses suffered, she was looking into the future and trying to piece together a picture where women would take on a more active role – both as mothers and professionals – to rebuild what had been ruined and to not let it happen again.

It’s a pity that people of such character, self-criticism and virtue are so rare, because they change the world for the better.