by Kate Kennedy
First published 2021
Kate Kennedy chronicles the life of Ivor Gurney, a gifted composer and poet whose promise was derailed by war and mental illness. Kennedy traces Gurney's journey from his promising days at the Royal College of Music through his enlistment as a private in the Gloucestershire regiment in 1915. She follows him into two brutal years in the Western Front trenches, where he was wounded and gassed at Passchendaele. While recovering in hospital, his first poetry collection Severn and Somme reached publication. Kennedy examines how Gurney attempted to resume his musical studies after the war despite recurring depression, only to be institutionalized in 1922. She explores his final fifteen years in the asylum, where he sometimes believed he was Shakespeare and imagined machines torturing him from below, yet continued creating music and poetry until tuberculosis claimed his life. Kennedy draws from extensive archival materials and applies insights from literary criticism, history, psychiatry, and musicology to illuminate the connections between trauma, madness, and artistic creation.
Genres: biography, historical-fiction, 20th-century, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: mental-illness, trauma
Setting: Gloucestershire, Passchendaele, Royal College of Music, Western Front
Period: 1915, 1922
512 pages · Hardcover · Princeton University Press
Content warnings: mental-illness