SASSOON, Siegfried.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Sherston's Progress. First editions, finely bound by Bayntun. The Sherston trilogy details the author's lonely youth, his idle years as a country gentleman, and his military service on the Western Front. The first instalment was readily considered a "classic of its kind - an elegy for a way of life which had gone for ever" (ODNB) and received the Hawthornden and James Tait Black Memorial prizes."Like Tolstoy's War and Peace, which he was also reading while he wrote his own book, it is the combination of factual detail and direct personal experience vividly rendered that makes Infantry Officer a convincing and compelling picture of war. As he told Ottoline [Morrell], he wanted to give 'a really truthful inner-narrative'. He believed that this had not yet been achieved by an English writer, apart from Blunden" (Wilson, p. 238). Sassoon considered the final instalment, Sherston's Progress, his best. It describes his recovery and return to the war after being treated by Dr W. H. R. Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital.

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