This abstract is compiled from materials provided by the publisher.
The rich and varied correspondence between English poet and heroic legend Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915) and his friend James Strachey, later the primary English translator of the works of Sigmund Freud, appear in print for the first time in Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905 - 1914, edited by Keith Hale.
Rupert Brooke, who died at the young age of 27 while serving in World War I, remains—for his handsome looks, Bloomsbury connections and poetic works—one of Britain's most romantic twentieth-century figures. James Strachey was his closest friend and (other than his mother) his most significant correspondent. The evolving relationship between these two gifted young men is intimately evoked in these rich, varied and startlingly explicit letters which illuminate one of the last pieces of the complex puzzle of Brooke's life. In fact, these letters are at times so disturbingly candid that Brooke's literary executors long opposed their publication.
Friends from boyhood, Brooks and Strachey were at Cambridge when James fell in love with his handsome, charming schoolmate. As well as their shared interest in politics, literature, art, and theater, the letters deal often and explicitly with the subject of homosexuality, and also with the scandalous activities of many in their close circle. Brooke and Strachey compare observations of fellow members of the exclusive Cambridge group known as “the Apostles” which included James' brother Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Bertrand Russell, among others), of mutual friends in Bloomsbury (including Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and George Mallory), and of fellow Fabian Socialists including Beatrice Webb.
The correspondence, at times shocking in its honesty, provides significant new biographical, psychological, and cultural insights into Brooke and his poetry, and it reveals the complexities of the real man behind the heroic legend that this early death inspired.
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