Francis Brett Young

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Francis Brett Young (June 29, 1884 – March 28, 1954) was an English novelist, poet, and composer.

Contents

[edit] Life

Brett Young was born in Halesowen, West Midlands. His father was a doctor and his mother also came from a medical family so it was natural that Brett Young trained at the University of Birmingham to become a physician. He started practice at Brixham, Devon, in 1907 and married Jessie Hankinson the following year. His wife was a singer and he accompanied her as well as composing two sets of songs for her, published in 1912 and 1913. During the First World War he saw service in Africa in the Medical Corps but was invalided out in 1918, no longer able to practice medicine. The couple went to live in Capri until 1929 but travelled widely, including trips to South Africa, the United States and summers in the Lake District of England. They returned to live in England from 1932 and settled at Craycombe House, Fladbury, Worcestershire. At the end of Second World War he moved toSouth Africa, dying in Cape Town in 1954. His ashes were returned to England and are in Worcester Cathedral.

Only after working for a while as a doctor did he turn to writing. Like many authors he uses the places and occupations he knew as the backdrops for his work. There is much description of the sea, war and medical practice set in places as far apart as the Midlands and West Country of England and South Africa. His first published novel Deep Sea (1914) has Brixham as a background while Portrait of Clare (1927) is set in the West Midlands, as are several of his works from this period. The Iron Age (1916) is set partly in Ludlow, Shropshire.

[edit] The Mercian Novels

The central project of Brett Young's career was a series of linked novels set in a loosely fictionalised version of the English West Midlands and Welsh Borders. The Mercian novels were originally inspired by the construction of Birmingham Corporation's Elan Valley Reservoirs from 1893-1904, and the country traversed by their associated aqueduct[1]. The Black Diamond (1921) tells the story of a labourer working on the aqueduct in the region around Knighton, while The House Under the Water (1932) deals at length with the construction of the reservoirs themselves. The series expanded into a wide-ranging study of Midlands society from the 1890s through to the outbreak of the Second World War. Although linked by recurring characters, each of the Mercian novels can be read as an independent work. They range in style from the atmospheric psychological horror of Cold Harbour (1924; praised by H. P. Lovecraft[2]) to the romantic family saga of Portrait of Clare (1927), which won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Like Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, the Mercian novels are unified by their setting - a semi-fictionalised realisation of an actual geographical region. While some actual place-names appear unchanged (eg Worcester, Kidderminster, Ludlow, Shrewsbury), most locations appear under a fictional name (Birmingham = North Bromwich, Halesowen = Halesby[3]; Dudley = Dulston; River Elan = River Garon). Other locations appear to be fictional conflations of various different real-world places; eg the Black Country town of Wednesford; resembling in many respects the actual town of Wednesbury but located by Brett Young in the Stour Valley (and seemingly unrelated to the real Wednesford, near Cannock), and the hamlet of Cold Harbour; modelled on Wassell Grove near Hagley[4] but described by Brett Young as overlooking the Black Country.

[edit] Selected works

  • The Iron Age (1916)
  • The Black Diamond (1921)
  • Cold Harbour (1924)
  • Portrait of Clare (1927)
  • My Brother Jonathan (1928)
  • The House Under the Water (1932)
  • White Ladies (1935)
  • Dr. Bradley Remembers (1936)
  • Far Forest (1936)
  • Mr Lucton's Freedom (1940)
  • A Man About the House (1942)
  • The Island (1944)
  • Portrait of a Village (1951)
  • Wistanslow (1956)

The Papers of Francis Brett Young are held at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.

[edit] Film and TV adaptations

My Brother Jonathan was adapted into a film starring Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray and James Robertson Justice in 1948. In 1985 it was adapted into a British television series starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Barbara Kellerman.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The Black Diamond; Preface - Francis Brett Young; Collins, 1921
  2. ^ The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature; Chapter IX - H. P. Lovecraft ed. S.T.Joshi; Hippocampus Press, 2000; ISBN 0-9673215-0-6
  3. ^ The Black Diamond; Preface - Francis Brett Young; Collins, 1921
  4. ^ Cold Harbour - Francis Brett Young, House of Stratus, 2003; ISBN 0-7551-1024-2

[edit] Links

The Francis Brett Young Society