Testament of Youth
Brittain lost her fiance, her brother, and her closest friends in WWI while nursing in France. Her memoir of that catastrophe (how the war destroyed everything, the long struggle to find meaning in the wreckage) is the definitive anti-war memoir of the 20th century, and a crucial feminist document.
Once the war ends, the book keeps going for two hundred pages: Oxford committee politics, lecture tours, League of Nations work, recounted with the same gravity as the deaths of Roland and Edward. Brittain's self-importance is load-bearing; she cannot describe a catastrophe without auditing her own development. The war chapters earn their place in the century. The rest is minutes of meetings.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
