Vera Mary Brittain was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, into a prosperous manufacturing family.
Vera Mary Brittain was born on 29 December 1893 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, the elder of two children of Thomas Arthur Brittain and Edith Mary Brittain. Her family's wealth derived from the paper manufacturing business, which afforded Vera a comfortable, if conventionally restrictive, upper-middle-class upbringing typical of provincial English families of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
From an early age, Brittain displayed intellectual ambition that clashed with the expectations placed on young women of her class, who were generally groomed for marriage rather than higher education or professional careers. Her determination to pursue university education, against her father's initial reluctance, foreshadowed the independent and often trailblazing path she would carve throughout her life.
Brittain's birth into this milieu is historically significant chiefly because of what she became: one of the most important literary witnesses to the First World War and a lifelong campaigner for peace, feminism, and social justice. Her memoir Testament of Youth (1933), chronicling her wartime experiences as a nurse and her personal losses, remains a canonical text of British war literature and a foundational document of twentieth-century feminist and pacifist thought.