Siegfried Sassoon: Return from the Trenches v. 2: A Biography

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

"The Making of a War Poet: 'promises to be the definitive biography...compassionate as well as critical' Robert Nye, The Scotsman 'Invaluable' Andrew Motion, The Times 'thorough and perceptive' Jeremy Lewis, The Observer 'necessary and engrossing' Neil Powell, TLS 'compelling' Ian Hamilton, The Sunday Telegraph"

UK Kirkus review

As Siegfried Sassoon himself pointed out in later life, many people assumed he had died in the First World War, along with his fellow war poets Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. In fact Sassoon was to live to the age of 80, dying in 1967 with many more poems and two sets of memoirs to his name, including the highly successful Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. In this sequel to her much-praised account of Sassoon's early life and war experiences, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet, Jean Moorcroft Wilson explores how the poet coped with his memories of the horrors of the trenches, his illegal homosexual desires and his need to forge a new literary identity for himself in the aftermath of the war. It's an absorbing story, told here with sympathy and understanding and backed up with vast quantities of research. Sassoon celebrated the Armistice with his first serious relationship, with the beautiful young soldier Gabriel Atkin, and spent the following decade in the midst of the London literary set, on close terms with writers from Edith Sitwell and E M Forster to Walter de la Mare. He continued to write poetry but his main preoccupation was with his romantic life. Attracted mainly by beautiful young men, he had affairs with Ivor Novello, Glen Byam Shaw and Prince Philipp of Hesse amongst others, but none of his relationships was truly happy, and Sassoon's need for control combined with his tendency to choose lovers with difficult personalities ensured frequent pain and jealousy. In 1933, to the astonishment of his friends, he married Hester Gatty; at first they were very happy together, and the birth of their son George was one of Sassoon's greatest joys, but the marriage disintegrated due to Sassoon's intense need for solitude, and he spent the rest of his life writing memoirs and poetry, his final years lightened by his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The greatest quality of Wilson's narrative is its success in giving equal weight to the various different areas of Sassoon's life - emotional, social, intellectual and literary. She is particularly good at illuminating how Sassoon's experiences affected his poetry, which she quotes frequently with insightful comments. This is a very detailed biography - sometimes excessively so - but Wilson's exhaustive researches have enabled her to get under Sassoon's skin and into his head, and the result is an absorbing and definitive volume. (Kirkus UK)

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