Julian Grenfell

by Nicholas Mosley

Book Overview

Julian Grenfell: His Life And The Times Of His Death 1888-1915 by Mosley, Nicholas This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0030175968
• ISBN13: 9780030175961
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Holt McDougal
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Life at the Edwardian Top

Julian Grenfell's parents, Lord Willy Desborough and his fascinating wife Ettie, were at the very top of the power structure during the Victorian fin de siecle and the first twenty years of the next century. Ettie, the granddaughter of two earls, was the great society charmer of her day, and was the cynosure of every eye among the 'Souls,' the coterie of wealthy aristocrats who happened to run the British Empire at its very height (they numbered among them Lord Curzon, the great Indian Viceroy, the Wyndham sisters, the Asquiths, and Arthur Balfour). But the same qualities that lef to Ettie's fascination as a beauty also made her a very vexing mother for her children: this book is largely a study of her dark and troubled relations with her eldest son Julian Grenfell, who died in the First World War just after writing what became one of the most famous war lyrics ever written, "Into Battle." The novelist Nicholas Mosley, who is himself Lord Curzon's grandson, wrote this very penetrating 1976 biography that shows the dark underside of the Edwardian power structure that made possible the stupid sacrifice of talented young men like Julian and his brother Billy in WWI: the book reverberates with this terrible telos. Mosley quotes very extensively from the letters and diaries of the Grenfell/Desboroughs and the 'Souls' throughout the work. Although their society codewords and gushiness can be almost unbelievably cloying and even stupid (the men care only for hunting and for worshipping the women; the women for manipulating the men and each other), the exposure of this mindset is one of Mosley's major points. This book is a great find for anyone interested in the First World War, in the Edwardians, or in modernism in general.