The George Sherston Trilogy (1-3) by Siegfried Sassoon
Requirements: ePUB Reader, 126 MB | Includes new by introductions Paul Fussell
Overview:The complete trilogy of George Sherston, with new introductions by celebrated historian Paul Fussell
A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war.
Genre: Fiction > Historical Fiction
#1 Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
In this first novel of the semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy, Sassoon wonderfully captures the vanishing idylls of the Edwardian English countryside. Never out of print since its original publication in 1928, when it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Sassoon’s reminiscences about childhood and the beginning of World War I are channeled through young George Sherston, whose life of local cricket tournaments and fox-hunts falls apart as war approaches and he joins up to fight. Sassoon’s first novel, though rife with comic characters and a jaunty sense of storytelling, presents his own loss of innocence and the destruction of the country he knew and loved.
#2 Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
The second volume of Siegfried Sassoon’s semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy picks up shortly after Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man: in 1916, with the young Sherston deep in the trenches of WWI. For his decorated bravery, and also his harmful recklessness, he is soon sent to the Fourth Army School for officer training, then dispatched to Morlancourt, a raid, and on through the Somme. After being wounded by a bullet through the lung, he returns home to convalesce, where his questioning of the war and the British Military establishment leads him to write a public anti-war letter (verbatim the letter Sassoon wrote in 1917, entitled "Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration", which was eventually read in the British House of Commons). Through the help of close friend David Cromlech (based on Sassoon’s friend Robert Graves) a medical board decides not to prosecute, but instead deem him to be mentally ill, suffering from shell-shock, and sends him to a hospital for treatment. Sassoon’s stunning portrayal of a mind coming to terms with the brutal truths he has encountered in war—as well as his unsentimental, though often poetic, portrayal of class-defined life in England at wartime—is amongst the greatest books ever written about World War I, or war itself.
#3 Sherston’s Progress
Having been deemed mentally ill for his anti-war sentiments and sent for treatment, George Sherston comes under the care of neurologist Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, who allows Sherston to sort through his attitudes toward the fighting (events that have also been semi-fictionalized by Pat Barker for her bestselling and critically acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy). After six months in the hospital, Sherston leaves to rejoin his regiment. He is soon dispatched to Ireland, where he attempts to reclaim some of the idyllic fox-hunting days of his youth, then to Palestine. He finally ends up at the Western Front in France, where he is shot in the head while on a reconnaissance mission and invalided back home. As the capstone of Sassoon’s masterful Sherston trilogy, Sherston’s Progress—whose evocation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is not at all accidental—literally brings home the unforgettable journey of George Sherston from aristocratic childhood through war hero and anti-war martyr, all the way to wounded veteran trying to move on from the Great War.
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