Gerald Brenan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gerald Brenan (1894–1987) was an English writer who spent much of his life in Spain. He is best known for The Spanish Labyrinth, a work of history on the background to the Spanish Civil War, and for South From Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village. He was awarded a CBE in 1982, and was much honoured in Spain.
He was born in Malta, and educated at Radley College. He spent some time training at Sandhurst, and then travelling in Europe, before serving in the British Army in France through World War I. After the war the artist John Hope-Johnstone introduced him to the Bloomsbury Group. In 1919 he settled in Spain, in the small village of Yegen, in the Alpujarra mountain range of the province of Granada. Contacts with Bloomsbury continued, particularly with Dora Carrington with whom he had a brief fling in 1922.
In Dorset in 1930 he met the American poet and novelist Gamel Woolsey (1895–1968); they married in Rome in 1931. During the Spanish Civil War and for many years afterwards they lived in Aldbourne in Wiltshire. Brenan was permitted to return to Spain in 1953. He lived out his life in Alhaurín el Grande, Málaga.
[edit] Works
- Jack Robinson. A Picaresque Novel (1933) as George Beaton
- Doctor Partridge's Almanack for 1935 (1934) as George Beaton
- Shanahan's Old Shebeen, or The Mornin's Mornin' (1940)
- The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (1943)
- The Spanish Scene (1946) Current Affairs No.7
- The Face of Spain (1951)
- The Literature of the Spanish People - From Roman Times To The Present Day (1951)
- South From Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village (1957)
- A Holiday by the Sea (1961)
- A Life of One's Own: Childhood and Youth (1962)
- The Lighthouse Always Says Yes (1966)
- St John of the Cross: His life and Poetry (1973) with Lynda Nicholson
- A Personal Record, 1920-1972 (1975)
- The Magnetic Moment; Poems (1978)
- Thoughts in a Dry Season: A Miscellany (1978)
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Xan Fielding editor (1986), Best of Friends. The Brenan–Partridge Letters, correspondence with Ralph Partridge
- Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (1994) A Life of Gerald Brenan
