Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth

A revised edition of the candid, sometimes shocking, biography of Rupert Brooke revealing the very different reality behind the golden-boy façade of an English literary icon

Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915. The 27-year-old author of the patriotic sonnet "The Soldier" was buried in a grave strewn with olive branches and scented with sage. All England mourned his passing. But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality. At the height of his promise, a disappointment in love triggered a mental and physical collapse that brought his inner complexities to the surface. Letters reveal a man who was sexually ambivalent, misogynistic, anti-Semitic—and sometimes alarmingly unstable. This revised edition of Nigel Jones’s admired biography, with a new chapter on a previously unknown affair of Brooke's, reveals a more conflicted and troubled individual than the gilded Adonis of English literary myth.