Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (Hardcover)

"Rupert Brooke - isn’t it a romantic name?" wrote Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf after his first meeting with the up and coming blue-eyed boy of English poetry. The stunning looks and charm that so entranced Strachey lasted through Brooke’s meteoric life - and long outlived the life that ended en route to the bloody beaches of Gallipoli in World War One. The image of Brooke as "one of England’s noblest sons", in Churchill’s obituary tribute, was fostered by his surviving friends, but served to obscure and mask a darker reality. For the fresh and boyish Brooke was in reality a man possessed by private demons and terrors that at one point took him to the brink of madness and suicide. Nigel Jones’s new biography lifts the mask and plants warts on the face that W.B. Yeats called "the handsomest in England".

The distorted picture of Brooke is the work of Christopher Hassall, his official biographer, who, writing in the early Sixties, was forced to be discreet to the point of dishonesty about his subject’s private life and loves; and Geoffrey Keynes, Rupert’s loyal friend, literary executor and the editor of his "Collected letters". Keynes wished to preserve a picture of Brooke that made no mention of the major facts that shaped his path through life. These included - · His early homosexuality. · His many heterosexual love affairs. · His mental and physical breakdown, which prostrated him for a year and led to the brink of madness and suicide. · His anti- Semitism, extreme even by the standards of his time. · His love-child, born during an idyllic affair with a Tahitan woman.

Since the deaths of Hassall and Keynes several writers have drawn attention to one or more of these aspects of Brooke’s troubled life; and collections of letters to friends and/or lovers have gradually become available. Now, for the first time, Nigel Jones, historian and acclaimed biographer of the alcoholic author Patrick Hamilton, draws out these secrets in the first full biography for more than thirty years. It presents a man for our times: complex, moody, changeable, extreme, unstable - yet gifted and brilliant too.

Drawing on Brooke’s vast correspondence, much of it suppressed by his heirs and never before published, it presents a picture of Brooke in the round that is less hero-worshipping but altogether more human. At a time when notions of patriotism, gender, media hype and war are once more in the melting pot it gives us the full story behind one of England’s enduring literary legends and the 20th century’s first and most brilliant literary star.

• Books > Biography > Novelists, Poets & Playwrights > Poets
• Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism > Literary Studies > 20th Century
• Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism > Poetry & Poets
• Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Poetry > Genres > Myths

• Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
• I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
• I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.