Treatments and therapies page 2

Sassoon, Owen and Graves
The history of Craiglockhart
The War's effect on ordinary people
links to related sites
Acknowledgements, credit and contact
Pat Barker's trilogy
Music, prose and trench art
Introduction
Pat Barker

Regeneration was the answer for those critics and although it seems to be a departure from the themes of her previous work, Regeneration continues the exploration of trauma (whether experienced by rich or poor) and the recovery from that trauma. Further, 1917 is a revisiting of a historical setting in Liza's England.

Barker had been interested in WWI since reading Owen and Sassoon's poetry as a teenager. She read Rivers' Conflicts and Dreams in her twenties which made her aware of his medical career. Her husband, retired zoology professor David Barker, introduced her to Rivers' nerve regeneration experiments with Dr Henry Head which in turn helped her form the character of Rivers in the novel.

Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees, near Middlesbrough. Barker never knew her father (who her mother met while serving as a WREN in WWII) and Barker was raised by her mother and grandmother - an upbringing that influenced the themes of her early novels Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984), Liza's England (1986 and also published as The Century's Daughter), and The Man Who Wasn't There (1989). Union Street was sold for film rights and became 'Stanley and Iris' with Jane Fonda and Robert DeNiro in 1990.These novels earned her a label as a regional writer only interested in working-class women's lives and many critics and reviewers asked if she could write male characters as well as she could draw out her female ones.

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Pat Barker 2