It was brought to the screen mostly by women: director Moira Armstrong, writer Elaine Morgan, and script editor Betty Willingale.
Based on her 1933 autobiography, Vera Brittain was aged 20 in 1913, living in Buxton with middle-class parents and devoted to her 18 year-old brother Edward. Against her parents' wishes, she applied for and received a scholarship to study English at Oxford.
After meeting Edward's close friends - Roland Leighton, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow - Vera and Roland's friendship led to an engagement, but World War I intervened.
The friends all enlisted and Vera became a nurse but by 1918, Roland, Geoffrey, Victor and Edward had all been killed.
Cheryl Campbell's Vera is still lustrous, loving, devastated, stoic, numb...
Shelf or charity shop? This is a keeper, a testament to the futility of war and the pain of grief. Apart from Cheryl Campbell. there are also fine performances from Emrys James and Jane Wenham as the fussy and over-protective Mr and Mrs Brittain and Rosalie Crutchley as the stern Oxford Principal Emily Penrose.
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