Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth - Hardcover

Jones, Nigel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781857164 ISBN 13: 9781781857168

Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2014

Synopsis

Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915, aged just 27. All England mourned his passing. But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality. At the height of his promise a disappointment in love triggered a mental and physical collapse that brought his inner complexities to the surface. Letters reveal a man who was sexually ambivalent, misogynistic, anti-Semitic - and sometimes alarmingly unstable. This revised edition of Nigel Jones's admired biography, including an account of a previously unknown affair of Brooke's, reveals a more conflicted and troubled individual than the gilded Adonis of English literary myth.

About this title

Review:

'Intelligent, witty and definitive: this is literary biography at its best' Andrew Roberts.

'This book is more than another contribution to the Great War centenary ... This is a big book about a short life that has a great deal to say about those who ran the Empire' The Herald.

'Poignant and illuminating, this is a fascinating study of the poet, his era, and the creation of a myth' Editor's Choice for the Good Book Guide.

'Jones's shocking 1990 biography is updated but is still the myth-buster to beat all myth-busters' Sunday Herald.

'This closely observed account of the poet and his privileged milieu is an absorbing read' The Independent.

From the Publisher:

The full story behind Englands most enduring literary legend
‘Intelligent, witty and definitive: this is literary biography at its best.’ Andrew Roberts

"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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1781857164
• ISBN 13: 9781781857168
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480