Born into a working-class Yorkshire family in 1943, Pat Barker never knew her father and was brought up by her maternal grandparents. Her first three novels depicted the lives of women, dominated by poverty and domestic violence. Barker notes, ‘I had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist — label, label, label — novelist’ (Nixon 2004, p. 21).
Barker wanted to escape from that box. As a child she had been fascinated by her step-grandfather’s First World War bayonet wound, but he never spoke of his wartime experiences: ‘So there was a wound, and there was silence. But that kind of silence becomes compelling. It’s a space which invites imaginative exploration.’ She realised she needed a particular perspective for this — that of ‘a character who was intelligent, compassionate and well informed but who, like me and like the reader, had no direct experience of the fighting in France’. She found this in Dr William Rivers, whose relationship with his patient, Siegfried Sassoon, became what Barker called ‘the spine of the book’ (Barker 2012).
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