Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

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Fine Editions Ltd is a member of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, and we subscribe to its codes of ethics. Sassoon seemed to enjoy it as an opportunity to enjoy the countryside and jump a lot of fences at high speed; an early extreme sport, if you will.

Sassoon was an earnest, unimaginative, platitudinous versifier, cranking out cliches about the countryside and self-absorbed reflections on his own life, the kind of thing that Stella Gibbons pilloried in Cold Comfort Farm as Asterisked Great Thoughts. Sassoon doesn't hold back from describing the impact of the war and the contrast between his life as a soldier and the convivial hunt gatherings from before the war. In the late 1920s, Sassoon turned to the prose sequence that occupied him for nearly two decades, the trilogy published as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, in 1937, in which the central character is a lightly fictionalized version of the young author.The First UK printing with the William Nicholson illustrations published by Faber and Faber in 1929. He remembers a period in the early days when he could still feel that…”the War was inevitable and justifiable. On the one hand Siegfried Sassoon’s _The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man_ (the first volume in a trilogy)can be seen as a paen to the idyllic way of life of a country gentleman before the war to end all wars destroyed any pretence to concepts of chivalry and gallant action. Instead we just have an uneasy sense that everything we read about has somehow been lost, and this gave the detailed explanations of fox hunting an interest that they wouldn't otherwise have had for me.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It is a depiction of his early years presented in the form of an autobiographical novel, with false names being given to the central characters, including Sassoon himself, who appears as "George Sherston". And the measured judgements of this cheerful innocent are much more powerful than any number of angry denunciations from other quarters.

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. Most of all, he lambasts himself: "The mental condition of a young man who asks nothing more of life than twelve hundred a year and four days a week with the Packlestone is perhaps not easy to defend. The title is somewhat misleading, as the book is mainly concerned with a series of landmark events in Sherston/Sassoon's childhood and youth, and his encounters with various comic characters. It's tempting, then, to regard Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man as an attempt to put things back together, to reclaim youth and vigour (Sassoon was in his 40s when he wrote it), to help a lost world live again (not to mention the men killed by war) and to fight the tide of modernism.

Bookseller's ticket of Albert Dowling, Bristol, on front pastedown of Infantry Officer; publisher's mailing card loosely inserted in Sherston's Progress. Many aspects of Sassoon's actual life are missing here - he would have you think Sherston is a bumbler - whereas he was known for being madly brave, a committed post-war socialist, and a closeted gay man. To watch the day breaking from purple to dazzling gold while we trotted up a deep-rutted lane; to inhale the early freshness when we were on the sheep-cropped uplands; to stare back at the low country with its cock-crowing farms and mist-coiled waterways; thus to be riding out with a sense of spacious discovery – was it not something stolen from the lie-a-bed world and the luckless city workers – even though it ended in nothing more than the killing of a leash of fox-cubs? With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. This book is however the first part of his best known prose work, a "fictionalised autobiography" in three parts, with Sassoon thinly disguised as one George Sherston.It won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being immediately recognised as a classic of English literature. Features an attractive original cream dust jacket with cobalt blue text, protected by removable clear plastic overlay. An uncommonly handsome set of Sassoon's celebrated World War I trilogy, one of the great classics of English literature (Fox-Hunting Man was awarded both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize).