Gerald Brenan: The Interior Castle
A Biography
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
'A masterpiece which delights from first page to last.' TLS
'Very clever, very funny and very bold.' Victoria Glendinning, Times
Born in 1894 to a well-off military family, Gerard Brenan was expected to follow the family tradition. But at Radley school he discovered a love of books and an urge to break the mould, which led him to abscond to Europe for six months. After the First World War he went to Spain, where he found the inspiration for his life's work (and began an affair with Dora Carrington.) Come the 1930s his life changed again, with marriage and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which inspired his masterpiece The Spanish Labyrinth (1943).
Drawing on long personal acquaintance as well as a wealth of unpublished correspondence, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy looks unflinchingly at the whole of this remarkable man of letters - from his venturesome spirit to his troublesome sexuality to his literary accomplishment.
'By no means unworthy to stand beside P N Furbank's Forster, Michael Holroyd's Strachey or Quentin Bell's Woolf... Affectionate but acerbic, learned but witty, elegant but relaxed, [Gathorne-Hardy] entertains as consistently as he informs.' Independent on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This thoroughly researched and richly detailed biography of writer and historian Gerald Brenan (1894-1987) traces the life of a little-known member of London's Bloomsbury Group. Gathorne-Hardy ( The City Beneath the Skin ) illuminates the childhood demons that drove Brenan from his upper-middle-class English surroundings to embark, at age 18 and nearly penniless, on a walking tour of Europe that would lead to a lifetime of travel and adventure. An incurable romantic, Brenan threw himself into countless love affairs (including a nearly incestuous infatuation with his daughter Miranda), although he and his wife, Gamel, whom he married in 1931, cared deeply for each other. Brenan and Gamel eventually settled in Spain, the country that inspired his finest literary and historical studies ( The Spanish Labyrinth and The Literature of the Spanish People ), and the place where both would end their days. Photos.
