Novel
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
Siegfried Sassoon · 1928
Synopsis
George Sherston, an orphan, grows up in the countryside with a spinster aunt. The groom Dixon gets him a pony, teaches him to ride and takes him hunting, and he soon thinks of nothing else: the packs, the point-to-point races between gentlemen, the flower-show cricket match where the scores are hung on a board of tin plates. He buys a horse beyond his means, admires an older boy who has become master of the hunt, and watches the summers go by. The summer of 1914 arrives.
Context
It appeared anonymously in September 1928, ten years after the war, and was the first of three volumes devoted to the same character, a thinly veiled double of its author under another name. The latter was then known only as a poet, in particular for his war verse. The book takes its hero from the 1890s to the front, in France, in 1916; the pleasures of the countryside precede the brutality of war, a contrast the whole trilogy develops.
Who it is for
About three hundred pages in the French translation revised in 2017, the first dating from 1936.
Prizes and reception
Published anonymously, it received the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize in 1929.
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