Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After

Vera Brittain

Feb 2010 · Hachette UK

About this ebook

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 volume of remembrance to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice.

About the author

Vera Brittain was born in 1893, and grew up in provincial comfort in Macclesfield and Buxton. In 1914, just as war was breaking out, she won an exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, interrupting her studies the following year to enlist as a VAD nurse. She became one of the best-loved writers of her time with the publication, in 1933, of her passionate record of a lost generation, Testament of Youth. She wrote twenty-nine books in all, and was a prolific lecturer and journalist, who devoted much of her energy to the causes of peace and feminism. Vera Brittain died in 1970. The authorised biography, Vera Brittain: A Life (1995) by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge is published by Virago Press.