Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain


This book changed my life.

I read this book in 1980 when I was in Year 9 (go on, do the maths). It is about the experiences of a young woman from quite a privileged background in 1914 and beyond, so it’s a good year to read the book. She had struggled against the Edwardian idea that women should not study and should stay at home. She battled for a place at Oxford University and had just achieved that aim when war broke out. Her brother went to fight, along with his friend. Vera had fallen in love with his friend. This is their story. It tells of how she gave up her university education to volunteer as a nurse on the Western Front. Her experiences turned her into a pacifist. I found it inspiring that someone could be so passionate about ideals that she could let them change her destiny. The book challenged me to study harder and to become more aware of what was happening in the world. It gave me my Higher Education and my politics. Perhaps this book won’t have such a strong effect on you, but is there a book that changed your life?

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf


It’s been many, many years since I read this book. I have forgotten the story but I still have a vivid picture of what it felt and looked like. Researching the book to write this, it turns out that my reaction is apparently correct. She was writing in what they call the “stream of consciousness” style. She was trying to give a sense of the flow of random thoughts and information from the senses that go through your mind. So that’s what I was supposed to get out of reading it! The story is set just over 100 years ago. A well-off family have a big holiday on the Scottish islands: Queen Victoria had made Scottish holidays very popular. Then 10 years go by in which several characters die. It finishes when the rest of the family meet up on the island again to fulfil a promise to visit the lighthouse. I think about it every time I see a lighthouse when I visit Scotland. It came back to me recently when I discovered that the father is based on Virginia Woolf’s own father, Leslie Stephen, who was a professor at Cambridge University as well as being one of England’s best ever mountaineers.