The Interior Castle

Aged 17, Gerald Brenan suggested to his friend Hope Johnstone that they settle together somewhere east of Pamirs. Surprisingly, the eccentric dandy agreed. They fled England in the summer of 1912: by winter Hope had collapsed, but not until the following February, freezing, penniless and having walked 1,500 miles, did Gerald give up. His life was to be studded with adventure. After World War I, Brenan spent four years alone in the remote Alpujarran mountains. Here he educated himself with 2000 books, wrote furiously and began his tormented and ecstatic love-affair with Dora Carrington, companion to Lytton Stratchey. He was drawn to the 1920s underworld - both in London and Seville - of prostitutes, flamenco singers and the poor. He was tormented by his sexuality, which was, like for many of his class and time, contorted and difficult. This book looks into this with insight and sensitivity, in a way which Brenan was unable to, even in his two autobiographies of which "A Life of One's Own" was one. But it was the Spanish Civil War and marriage to the poetess, Gamel Woolsey, that produced books auch as "The Spanish Labyrinth" and "South From Granada". Brenan knew some of the most brilliant people of his time, including Augustus John, Roger Fry, Bertrand Russell, Cyril Connolly, David Garnett, V.S. Pritchett, Lorca, e.e. cummings and - though he never belonged to the group - he didn't think it existed - Bloomsbury.