A Conversation with Katherine Mackenzie 

by Isabela Barboza, 02/19/2024

"Incessant Conflict: 

Vera Brittain’s Witness to the Female Trauma of the Great War"

This paper explores the experience of Vera Brittain, a British Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse during World War I, as described in her memoir, Testament of Youth. Mackenzie discusses the female war experience, thus bringing light to the relatively dismissed trauma experienced by the females of the Lost Generation. 

Wartime experiences are shared but never identical. For this reason, memoirs by first-hand survivors are mesmerizing in their capability to unite while remaining altogether unique.

When given a list of books in her junior history seminar, which was World War I narrative-themed, Mackenzie’s attention was caught by Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. After the initial captivation subsided, Mackenzie found herself sinking into the memoir’s themes of “the female war experience, particularly the aspects that were overlooked such as the complex trauma of being a woman and a war worker, having loved ones in the war and having to balance the responsibilities at home.” Mackenzie even made a correlation with America Ferrera’s sentiment in the 2023 movie Barbie about the expectation placed on women to be everything and Brittain’s reflections about the wartime society’s overbearing expectation for their women to be more than just service members. 

 Beyond an interest in the subject matter, Mackenzie developed a personal connection to the author. Amidst the “inherent coolness” of the female war literature, Katherine felt most connected with Brittain’s prose and her approachability. It felt like Brittain and Mackenzie could really get to know each other instead of being two women separated by 200 years of history. 

As she harvested this relationship with the text and Brittain, Katherine became attuned to the pain with which the memoir was written. She became increasingly aware of the tension Brittain experienced as a young woman of the Edwardian Era that was held to Victorian Era expectations. This means that she was neither guaranteed an education nor viewed as a person in her own right. Certain men in Brittain’s life proved pivotal to her development. Her brother convinced Brittain’s father to send her to Oxford. Brittain’s brother's friends soon became her dearest friends. Roland Leighton, one of Brittain's brother’s friends, became her fiancé. Both her brother and her fiancé  passed during the war, and Mackenzie reflects on this as a big wound for Brittain. These men knew somewhat of her experience, and they were stripped away from her in a way nobody else could understand. This trauma simply piled on top of the ache of not being recognized by those back home as a person experiencing the trauma of the war first-hand. Mackenzie lamentingly said in her interview that, “[people] thought they were just rolling bandages and singing songs and holding soldiers’ hands” but that she remembers “a really visceral description [where Brittain] literally describes the limbs, the blood, the terror” of a hospital overflowing with wounded soldiers. 

Amidst the homeland’s ignorance of her reality, though, Brittain did not shy away from her patriotism. She “prevailed and kept going,” gave witness through her writing, and “ended up working for the League of Nations and being a British representative.” When asked how her paper could impact people today, Mackenzie was of the sentiment that we should all take into consideration Brittain’s creation of something “beautiful and powerful” out of such terrible struggle. Especially for women, Mackenzie found the memoir to be “validating” because she was both “vulnerable in sharing emotional turmoil but [the work] was also highly refined.” Her takeaway for all is that Brittain’s memoir of trauma, sacrifice, and community should push us to “work with each other to create a better space than they had to process our struggles in a way that is more complete and less of a phenomenon.” 

Katherine tends to be a perfectionist, she says, but she submitted her work to Inventio because she “didn't want this paper to end with the end of the [junior history seminar].” In gaining closeness with Vera Brittain through her memoir, Katherine Mackenzie learned about the need for equality, vulnerability, and empathy and her hope is that her work might spark that light for Inventio readers too.

Read "Incessant Conflict: Vera Brittain's Witness to the Female Trauma of the Great War" in the upcoming issue of Inventio's Volume 9!