Song of Love : The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier

A six-year correspondence between the World War I poet and his schoolgirl muse, Noel Oliver, edited by Oliver's granddaughter, provides a glimpse of Edwardian England as it reveals the true and enduring nature of young love. 10,000 first printing.

English poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), famed for his WW I sonnets, began writing love letters to Noel Oliver (1883-1969) in 1909, when she was 15, and they exchanged missives until his war-related death. Both traveled in Bloomsbury circles, and their correspondence is peppered with references to Virginia (Woolf), Lytton (Strachey) and other prominent figures of the age. Since Brooke's love for Oliver was unrequited, many of the letters deal with his depression, threats of suicide and a love affair with Katherine Cox, whom he rejected as "unclean" when she responded to his sexual advances. Oliver's responses show an emotional maturity beyond her years as she attempts to be kind to her suitor while extricating herself from his obsessive devotion. Edited by Oliver's granddaughter, the correspondence will be of interest to Bloomsbury followers and social historians. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Tactfully edited by Noel Olivier's granddaughter, these passionate, vivid, and poignant letters between the young poet sentimentalized after his death in WW I and the schoolgirl who became Britain's first female pediatrician re-create the commonplaces of romantic love in the fragile, doomed world of English country literati during the early 1900's. The letters--134 of the surviving 170--begin in the spring of 1909, when Brooke, son of a Rugby schoolmaster, was studying at Cambridge, and Olivier, daughter of a colonial governor of Jamaica, was attending the liberal Bedales school. From the badinage of the early letters--the self-conscious wit, the negotiations of where, how, and with whom they should meet--the correspondents progress to issues of character and feeling and then, suddenly, to Brooke's declaration of love. Olivier--reserved, inexperienced, more concerned with sports than sweethearts--is frightened by his intensity even as Brooke is convinced that they are destined for each other. Idealistic but nonpolitical, intelligent but not intellectual, the letters depict young people concerned with their pleasures--traveling, attending the theater and concerts, visiting- -and review the emotional turmoil of their friends, as well as the camping trips they shared with James Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf--who were to become the Bloomsbury group. Their meetings leave Brooke ecstatic, Olivier confused. They experiment with being apart, with being with others; vacillate between feeling ``high-souled'' and ``scuffling, dirtied, hurt''; and share their dreams: He conquered the world with a steamroller, and she had a virgin birth. They part, reluctantly--Brooke to join the war but dying, like Byron, of an infection in Greece before battle, and Olivier to attend medical school, marry a doctor, and bear five children. The original sonnets, the wistful photos (32 pages b&w), the editorial notes and narratives included here are useful and illuminating; but, as emotional and psychological history, the letters stand on their own--powerful, authentic, universal. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The correspondence between English poet Brooke and Noel Olivier began after they met in 1908, when he was 20 and she 15, and ended in 1915 with Brooke's death in World War I. Their letters, published here for the first time, form a spirited exchange filled with romantic longing, self-reflection, self-discovery, an endless stream of emotions, and "quarreling about words." In love, the poet becomes angry, passionate, jealous, possessive, whining, insecure, and self-effacing, while Olivier is feisty, more level-headed, middle-class, and practical, determined to pursue her career in medicine. Their correspondence continued even after her rejection of his marriage proposal and his breakdown in 1912. At times the letters are tedious and repetitious, as when the two discuss endless plans to arrange meetings, but on the whole they can be recommended as a glimpse of the England of those years. This work will find its audience among poetry enthusiasts and literary scholars.
-Lesley Jorbin, Cleveland State Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.