Fatal Glamour

The Life of Rupert Brooke

Paul Delany

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780773582781
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito letterario

Rupert Brooke (b. 1887) died on April 23, 1915, two days before the start of the Battle of Gallipoli, and three weeks after his poem "The Soldier" was read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday. Thus began the myth of a man whose poetry crystallizes the sentiments that drove so many to enlist and assured those who remained in England that their beloved sons had been absolved of their sins and made perfect by going to war. In Fatal Glamour, Paul Delany details the person behind the myth to show that Brooke was a conflicted, but magnetic figure. Strikingly beautiful and able to fascinate almost everyone who saw him - from Winston Churchill to Henry James - Brooke was sexually ambivalent and emotionally erratic. He had a series of turbulent affairs with women, but also a hidden gay life. He was attracted by the Fabian Society's socialist idealism and Neo-Pagan innocence, but could be by turns nasty, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic. Brooke's emotional troubles were acutely personal and also acutely typical of Edwardian young men formed by the public school system. Delany finds a thread of consistency in the character of someone who was so well able to move others, but so unable to know or to accept himself. A revealing biography of a singular personality, Fatal Glamour also uses Brooke's life to shed light on why the First World War began and how it unfolded.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Rugby, August 1887–September 1906
• 2 Cambridge: Friendship and Love, October 1906–May 1909
• 3 The Fabian Basis, October 1906–December 1910
• 4 Apostles, and Others, October 1906–October 1909
• 5 Grantchester, June–December 1909
• 6 Ten to Three, January–September 1910
• 7 Couples, October 1910–May 1911
• 8 Combined Operations, January–December 1911
• 9 Hungry Hands, December 1911–January 1912
• 10 To Germany with Love, January–April 1912
• 11 The Funeral of Youth, May–August 1912
• 12 Raymond Buildings, August 1912–May 1913
• 13 Stepping Westwards, May 1913–May 1914
• 14 The Soldier, June–December 1914
• 15 Gallipoli, January–April 1915
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index