Has anyone else read the book?

I read the book years ago before the 1979 mini series with Cheryl Campbell brilliantly playing Vera. That series was wonderful and, whilst I look forward to the film, I think I have been spoilt by that wonderful series. I think the series was five parts so obviously, they won't be able to put as much material into the film, but. I live in hope. It is a good cast.

@emrysjamespendragon » Sun Jun 22 2014 09:00:23

Vera Brittain's autobiography [it is not a novel] is superb. I have taught it several times in "Documentary Film and Literature of Modern War," a course I designed for the Honors Program at a flagship state university. I doubt that any film can do justice to it. The book is heartbreaking beyond belief, just as Vera Brittain's experiences were. [She lost her fiance Roland Leighton, two good friends, and her brother in that unnecessary, hideous conflict styled "The Great War."]

I was unpleasantly surprised by the movie. My understanding is that Testament of Youth, the famous book series, is a factual memoir, yes? One of the most important pieces of post WWI British literature, and an internationally renowned proto-feminist author?

There were just so. vera. many. overt anachronistic errors that it kept pulling me back out of the movie. An unpaid college intern working as a PA with a smartphone and wikipedia could have caught a LOT of the errors in one afternoon. For one example, Roland is sick when leaving for France in the Fall of 1914. Aunt Belle pops up and helpfully yammers on, while making him a cuppa, about how all the troops have been coming down with what all the newspapers are all calling the Spanish Influenza.

The earliest known case of what would only months later be called the spanish flu was in March 1918--and in Kansas in the USA. While I'm uncertain as to when the first british soldier cases of the spanish flu were reported I am reasonably certain they did not involve time travelling Tommies, newspapers, and teleporting flu-bugs.

Maybe the producer hired the writers from Terminator: Genisys to punch up Vera Brittain's stuffy old book about some boring old war that didn't involve nearly enough dead Jon Snow in spite of the millions upon millions of dead?

Other commentators have latched on to any number of easily fixed problems or pointed out the omnipresent problems with appropriate uniforms & gear. One that bothered me is that the appalling casualties and near total destruction of the professional BEF during the Battle of the Frontiers and the First Battle of the Marne during August and September have seemingly been moved until conveniently the evening papers of the day Roland leaves for France. Once again, the screenwriter seems to think WWI needs some punching up to be properly dramatic. I suppose my views more closely match that of no less an authority than Winston Churchill, who, late in his life, described the opening months of WWI a drama never surpassed in human history.




I will likely seek out the 1979 miniseries because I was left so dissatisfied by this version.

I read it, when I was 14. That was 34 years ago. I've reread it twice, in my 20s, and in my 30s. It's a new book each time. To say it made a deep impression on me is an understatement. It engraved itself on my consciousness-- I could recall pages verbatim, because sometimes I had to stop to read them a couple of times, they were just that good. It was the first time good writing made me cry just because it was that good, not because of the content.

I'm not sure how I missed the BBC mini-series the first time Masterpiece Theater ran it, but I picked up the book in the first place because I'd missed it. I then saw it a few years later. It was great, but you'd need more to capture the entire book, really. And you need a brilliant actress to play Vera, because so much of the book is internal, and has to be communicated subtextually in a dramatization.

I haven't seen the movie, but it's nagging me, like a carton of milk in the fridge I know has gone bad, and I have to sniff it before I throw it out.

I read and loved her book years ago. I was looking forward to this movie. I thought the movie was wonderful. I never saw the mini series.

Just read the book and held off watching movie. The book is qmazing. I found it hard to get into but especially the last third is truly awe inspiring.