Gerald Brenan

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Gerald Brenan

Edward Fitzgerald Brenan (born April 7, 1894 in Sliema , Malta , † January 19, 1987 in Alhaurín el Grande ) was a British writer and Hispanist.

Life

Gerald Brenan was the son of a British officer who grew up in India and South Africa. He then lived as a teenager in England, where he attended Radley College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst . Like his father, Brenan first pursued a military career and took part in the First World War as a British officer. After the war, Brenan was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group through his friend Ralph Partridge , where he met Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington .

In autumn 1919 Brenan moved to Spain, where he lived until 1936 - with longer interruptions - in the Andalusian village of Yegen. After a turbulent affair with Dora Carrington, Brenan married the American writer Gamel Woolsey (1895–1968) in 1930, with whom he lived until her death. A few weeks after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the couple left Spain and lived first in Gibraltar and later in England. It wasn't until 1953 that Brenan and Woolsey went back to Spain to the Andalusian village of Churriana. After his wife's death in 1970, Brenan moved to the Andalusian mountain village of Alhaurín el Grande , where he died in 1987.

Works

The self-taught Brenan, who never went to university, was the author of numerous books, including novels, travelogues, historical analyzes, poems, a literary history and an autobiography. He became famous for his book The Spanish Labyrinth , which examined the socio-historical background of the Spanish Civil War . The Spanish Labyrinth has been recognized by a wide variety of historians as a fundamental study of recent Spanish history. Eric Hobsbawm called it "the best book on modern Spain". For Hugh Thomas it was “an ingenious work that illuminates the whole history of Spain in the 20th century”, and Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to the author: “Ever since I read The Spanish Labyrinth I have looked upon you as my ideal historian - you see the past in the present, and the present in the past, imaginatively, and yet with corrective scholarship, and you express it in perfect prose. "

Books (selection)

  • The Spanish labyrinth. An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War , Cambridge 1943. German edition: Die Geschichte Spaniens. On the social and political background of the Spanish Civil War , Berlin 1978.
  • The Face of Spain , London 1950. German edition: The Face of Spain. Report of a trip through the south , Kassel 1991.
  • The Literature of the Spanish People - From Roman Times to the Present Day , Cambridge 1951.
  • South From Granada. Seven Years in an Andalusian Village , London 1957. German edition: Südlich von Granada , Kassel 1990.
  • A Personal Record, 1920-1972 , Cambridge 1975.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, New York: Pantheon Books, 1973, p. 84.
  2. ^ Hugh Thomas: The Spanish Civil War , Berlin 1962, p. 13.
  3. ↑ Trevor-Roper to Brenan, March 11, 1968, in: One Hundred Letters From Hugh Trevor-Roper, eds. Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman, Oxford 2014, p. 145.
personal data
SURNAME Brenan, Gerald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brenan, Edward Fitzgerald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer and Hispanist
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Sliema , Malta
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 1987
Place of death Alhaurin el Grande