"The Great Lover,“ by Jill Dawson, details the life of British poet Rupert Brooke. Like me, I will presume that before now you haven’t heard of Brooke, so I will give you a quick recap.
Brooke is most famously known for his lines from his poem "The Soldier”: ‘If I should die, think only this of me / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England’. Brooke was known for having many lovers, both men and women, and in addition to writing poetry tried his hand at fiction. He died on his way to war during World War I of sepsis before entering battle. He wrote in the circle of people like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, and was known to have emotional problems stemming from sexual confusion and paranoia.
Dawson’s portrayal of Brooke is half through her interpretation of what his own thoughts might have been, as well as through the eyes of his many flirtations. (I hesitate to call them lovers because it is not clear how far many of the relationships went.
Through the eyes of Nell, one of the maids of the tea house where he spent a great deal of his time, is how we learn much of what we know about Brooke.
Brooke was a man of his time, having the same behavior and sexist views that we could expect any man from the early 1900s to have. He flirted with as many women (and men) as he came into contact with, and expected to be taken care of by some woman, whether it be his mother, a maid, or lover.
Nell is a beekeeper’s daughter who, after the death of her father, was forced to find a position as a maid in a tea house, and this is where she meets Brooke. Fascinated and at the same repelled, Nell tries to keep her distance, but Brooke makes this impossible.
With each passing year, Nell falls more in love with Brooke, even though she knows she can’t possibly be the only one. In this, Nell is also stereotypical, but who is to say that aside from being stereotypical, this is not a realistic representation of a woman from this time period?
Eventually, Brooke’s emotional problems force him abroad, where he settles in Tahiti for a few months. There, (of course) he meets a woman and has a child whom he never knows of. Some of his best poetry was written there.
Brooke was an astonishingly complicated character, and Dawson has portrayed him and his struggles well, giving a name as well as a face to a poet that many of us have never heard of, although he associated with numerous famous writers.