First edition, first impression. 114pp. Black publisher's cloth-covered boards, white lettering on the spine. 12mo. Cloth is a little worn, pushed at corners and spine ends. Internally a hint of page creaming, especially on free endpapers. In its original dust wrapper, shelf worn, rubbed, bumped and chipped at edges, scuffed at spine ends with some mild browning on verso.
Vera Brittain is perhaps best remembered as the author of the best-selling memoir, Testament of Youth (1933). From the dust wrapper: "This book endeavors to explain and establish the truth of a thesis which the author outlined in a novel: I suppose, if we took a long enough view, we should feel that any sorrow bears its own compensation which enlarged the scope of human mercy. Some of us, perhaps, can never reach our honorable estate - the state of maturity, of true understanding?until we have wrested strength and dignity out of humiliation and dishonor. Since writing these words about a character in a story, Vera Brittain has been able to test their meaning, for she has had to pay, in this Second World War, a considerable price for holding convictions derived from her share in the events of the first. After much conflict she has come to realize that humiliation, like other forms of suffering, is a spiritual experience; and to recognize that this experience in itself provides a means by which she, and others in a similar position, should be able to bring consolation and strength to the many whose lives are to-day shadowed or broken by catastrophes which power-politics have brought upon mankind."
