Gerald Brenan

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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 into a well-off Anglo-Irish family, while his father was serving there in the Army. He was educated at Radley College, where he was bullied and which he hated. He had a bad relationship with his father, whose wealth and upper-middle-class values he despised. At the age of 18, and to spite his father who wanted him to train at Sandhurst, he set off with an older friend, the occasional photographer and eccentric, John Hope-Johnstone, to walk to China. Between August 1912 and January 1913 they walked 1,560 miles, reaching Bosnia before lack of money made them turn back. He spent the next 10 months in Germany learning the language, surprisingly in preparation for joining the Indian Police Service. This plan was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. He immediately joined up and served in the British Army in France throughout the war. After the war John Hope-Johnstone introduced him to the Bloomsbury Group. Because of lack of money, in 1919 he settled in Spain, in the small village of Yegen, in the Alpujarra mountain range of the province of Granada. He spent his time catching up on the education which he felt he had missed by not attending university, and in writing. Contacts with Bloomsbury continued, particularly with Dora Carrington, who was the wife of his best friend Ralph Partridge, and with whom he had an intense, and intermittently sexual, relationship from 1919 to 1928.

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

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