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15 Works 260 Members 3 Reviews

About the Author

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is a lecturer at Birkbeck College, London.

Works by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

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Common Knowledge

Birthdate
1941-10-03
Gender
female
Nationality
UK
Occupations
academic
writer
Relationships
Woolf, Cecil (spouse)
Organizations
Birkbeck College, University of London

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Reviews

Of all the reviews of Sassoon’s life and works, a great number of them are distressingly wounding, critical, and misinformed. Even after reading Wilson’s excellent biographies, a number of critics form a seemingly odd and inexplicable reading of Sassoon’s life. Just because a man’s life is exposed to the public eye through biography, it does not mean that he should be treated as if belonging to some separate realm of morals; it is odd, then, to find a number of finger-wagging criticisms of how Sassoon lived his life, the choices he made.

Peter Parker, writing in the Telegraph, condescends with: “It was [Sassoon’s] great misfortune that he had an almost unerring ability to plump for Mr Wrong”. From the same article,”Sexually speaking, Sassoon developed a disastrous predilection for cheap liqueurs during the 1920s”. Parker’s article, tellingly and worryingly, seems to make poorly masked criticisms of Sassoon’s sexual preferences.

Despite reading Wilson’s biography, then, as well as other biographies of the poet, so many critics seem to do nothing more than pedal half-baked assumptions and value judgements that seem massively unfair. A conventional myth put about is that Sassoon “peaked” early, that his war poetry was all that was of value, relegating his later poetry – Vigils (1935), The Heart’s Journey (1928) – to obscurity. One of the strength’s of Wilson’s biographies are their reimagining of Sassoon’s less known verse, picking out wonderful examples of Sassoon’s mature poetic ability. Ferdinand Mount, in an otherwise perceptive and colourful piece about Sassoon, remarks on the following: “it was Sassoon's own inclination to look back to lost worlds and the happy days of his youth that kept him so stubbornly hostile to TS Eliot and to Modernism in general”. You’ll notice that here there is a massive and flippant dismissal of Sassoon’s verse – its diction, its sentiment, its conventions. Moreover, it makes a value assumption that ‘good’ verse is and must be ‘modern’ – it suggests that being “stubbornly hostile” to “Modernism in general” was a bad, obstinate poetic mis-decision.

Why Mount is happy to reject a man’s output – heartfelt and in many cases very accomplished – simply because it does not fit with his own assumptions and values about ‘proper poetry’ is beyond me. It’s as if Mount and Parker, among others, are unable to gauge that poetry is something revelatory, the making and emergence of vision and identity. There’s nothing wrong with appropriate, balanced interpretation and study of poetry; however, these readings are a country mile and more from literary criticism.

This pattern is repeated again in Jeffrey Meyers’ article in the TLS, writing: “[Sassoon] peaked early, in 1917-21, and went on publishing despite a long poetic decline. After the war, Sassoon returned to his uneventful, aimless country-squire life of hunting, cricket and golf - punctuated by frequent car crashes.”Not only is this – again – a flippant and unexamined assertion (after all, Wilson expertly shows quite the opposite from poetic “decline”), but it is also dismissive of the rich life that Sassoon led; far from “uneventful, aimless”, Sassoon travelled widely, worked as literary editor for a London newspaper, produced poetry and prose, became active in Labour politics, and began to explore the love that he had previously thought beyond him. Certainly Sassoon remained a complex man living an often paradoxical existence, but he cannot be dismissed so unfairly.

This brings me, in a roundabout way, to Wilson’s biographies. These are exquisitely researched, intelligent and often witty ruminations on Sassoon’s life and times. Wilson handles a mass of material, much of it new, with aplomb. And, most importantly, she shakes off the old myth that Sassoon was only ever an efficient war poet. Wilson explores his pastoral and religious verse with great skill and humility. It is only unfortunate that many professional critics, who have read and reviewed Wilson’s biographies, can then go on to so glibly and dismissively deny Sassoon his poetic status, and even dismiss the way in which he lived his life. No man is perfect, and complexity is certainly not a bad or unwanted dimension to a man’s personality.

Writing on Max Egremont’s biography of Sassoon, Meyers puts forward that: “In the final 300 pages of the work, Egremont strains to sustain our interest in Sassoon's postwar life”. This tells us only that Meyers is interested in a one dimensional view of Sassoon’s life – Sassoon the war poet, Sassoon the angry prophet. If the purpose of biography is to open up and examine a whole life, it would seem that a number of critics have somehow missed the point, seeing the genre only as a means to confirm assumptions of a life rather than to set out new readings and understandings of it. Wilson’s biography remains a triumph.
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DuneSherban | Jul 10, 2012 |
Jean Moorcroft Wilson's first volume of biography about the poet and author, Siegfried Sassoon, is a timely and meticulous - as well as very readable - account of Sassoon's youth and war experiences.

Like all good biographies, it is detailed while flowing, and gives a good impression not only of Sassoon the man as well as his environment. Throughout, we are given an impression of the wider world that shaped, or did not shape, the poet.

At the same time, this isn't just the expected narrative; it isn't "Sassoon and the trenches". Certainly that is the point toward which the narrative moves, but it is very careful to give the bredth of Sassoon's experiences attention. While at war, Sassoon was an efficient officer and a bit of a daredevil. He was not always the committed poet. Rather, it was behind the lines, at Liverpool (so abject!), in Ireland (hunter's bliss), in London (the literary lights) that Sassoon put pen to paper and created some of the most memorable poems of the 20th century. Or for any time.

Wilson is a good story teller and a good reader of people. She presents Sassoon to us in a balanced and well evidenced manner. She lets us know what he got up to, but doesn't bore us with turgid detail. And most importantly, perhaps, the biography drifts over into literary criticism, offering interpretations and readings of his works in light of Sassoon's experiences.

I'm waiting for volume II in the post as I write.
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DuneSherban | Jun 20, 2012 |
A delightful book which finds yet another new publishing twist on the Bloomsbury Group.

Here we have the story of Virginia Woolf told not only through her houses in London but also through her extensive use of the city in her novels.

The writer is well placed to write this as she is married to Leonard Woolf's nephew, the publisher Cecil Woolf.
 
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Chris_V | Jun 7, 2009 |

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Works
15
Members
260
Popularity
#88,386
Rating
3.9
Reviews
3
ISBNs
39

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