Brenan won a scholarship to Radley College. His father insisted he went to Sandhurst Military Academy but at seventeen he left to travel around Europe. One of the women who knew him at the time commented: "As a young man Brenan was tall, sparely built, and agile; he had straight fair hair and small, nearly black eyes set wide apart in a face that was expressive and charming rather than good looking." On the outbreak of the First World War he was commissioned into the 5th Battalion Gloucester Regiment and served on the Western Front at Ypres, Passchendaele, and the Somme. While in the army he met Ralph Partridge, and the two men became great friends. A brave soldier, he won the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre during the war.
In 1919 Brenan decided to move to Spain and rented a little house in the village of Yegen in the Alpujarras district of the province of Granada. According to his biographer: "Here he began life in his adopted country, devoting himself to reading, walking immense distances in the mountains, and writing quantities of long and brilliant letters." Gretchen Gerzina, has argued: "His family was strongly opposed to what they viewed as a lazy, pointless existence and he was given little financial support. Spain was inexpensive, and he therefore packed up his books and set out for a monastic life of study and writing in the remote regions of Andalusia on 13 January 1920. Yegen was poor but visually stupendous. At 4,000 feet above sea level, one could see the Sierra Nevada chain of mountains rising behind it. Streams ran down the hillsides, and houses seemed suspended along the incline. It was full of light and air, with wonderful colours, and at night the stars were brilliant and multitudinous."
Brenan was a regular visitor to Mill House, the home of Ralph Partridge, Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey, when he was in England. Brenan later described an early visit: "Carrington came to the door and with one of her sweet, honeyed smiles welcomed me in. She was wearing a long cotton dress with a gathered skirt and her straight yellow hair, now beginning to turn brown, hung in a mop round her head. But the most striking thing about her was her eyes, which were of an intense shade of blue and very long-sighted, so that they took in everything they looked at in an instant. Passing a door through which I saw bicycles, we came into a sitting room, very simply furnished, in which a tall, thin, bearded man was stretched out in a wicker armchair with his long legs twisted together. Carrington introduced me to Lytton who, mumbling something I did not catch, held out a limp hand, and then led me through a glass door into an apple orchard where I saw Ralph, dressed in nothing but a pair of dirty white shorts, carrying a bucket."
Brenan got on very well with Lytton Strachey and he introduced him to Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Arthur Waley and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. Another member, Frances Marshall, later recalled in her autobiography, Memories (1981): "They were not a group, but a number of very different individuals, who shared certain attitudes to life, and happened to be friends or lovers. To say they were unconventional suggests deliberate flouting of rules; it was rather that they were quite uninterested in conventions, but passionately in ideas. Generally speaking they were left-wing, atheists, pacifists in the First World War, lovers of the arts and travel, avid readers, Francophiles. Apart from the various occupations such as writing, painting, economics, which they pursued with dedication, what they enjoyed most was talk - talk of every description, from the most abstract to the most hilariously ribald and profane."
Ralph Partridge married Dora Carrington in May 1921. Dora wrote to Lytton Strachey on her honeymoon: "So now I shall never tell you I do care again. It goes after today somewhere deep down inside me, and I'll not resurrect it to hurt either you or Ralph. Never again. He knows I'm not in love with him... I cried last night to think of a savage cynical fate which had made it impossible for my love ever to be used by you. You never knew, or never will know the very big and devastating love I had for you ... I shall be with you in two weeks, how lovely that will be. And this summer we shall all be very happy together."
In 1924 Strachey and Partridge bought Ham Spray House in Ham, Wiltshire, where a studio was made for Carrington and a library for Strachey. Julia Strachey, who visited her at Ham Spray, recalls: "From a distance she (Carrington) looked a young creature, innocent and a little awkward, dressed in very odd frocks such as one would see in some quaint picture-book; but if one came closer and talked to her, one soon saw age scored around her eyes - and something, surely, a bit worse than that - a sort of illness, bodily or mental. She had darkly bruised, hallowed, almost battered sockets."
They became lovers. Brenan's biographer has argued: "His love affair with Dora Carrington was far the most serious in his life, producing as it did an enormous two-way correspondence, some ecstasy, and considerable unhappiness on both sides. Otherwise he was obsessed by sex, and inhibited by fears of impotence. A stream of prostitutes, hippies, and peasant girls occupied his agitated thoughts and feelings and directed his travels."
In another letter dated 21st September 1925, Carrington argued: "It is simply another proof of our fundamental difference of character. I wish to bury the past, you have an infinite capacity for investigating it. I do not believe any particular circumstances made our relation impossible. It was rather my predestined inability, (which whenever I think of my past life is forced upon me), to have any intimate relations with anyone. I believe I am a perfect combination of a nymphomaniac and a wood-nymph! I hanker after intimacies, which another side of my nature is perpetually at war against. Lately, removed from any intimacies, causing no one unhappiness and having no sense of guilt I have felt more at peace inside myself than I have ever felt before." Brenan replied that the sex act was a natural outgrowth of mutual fondness, that one "cannot separate in this way the intellectual and the physical." However, she disagreed and that aspect of their relationship came to an end.
Gerald Brenan returned to Spain where he was visited by Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Ralph Partridge, Bertrand Russell, Dora Russell, V. S. Pritchett, Roger Fry and David Garnett. His biographer, Frances Partridge, later claimed: "At his best a brilliant and amusing talker, Brenan's character was full of contradictions: he had a great capacity for prolonged and concentrated study as well as outstanding intelligence and originality in the interpretation of its results; he would often work far into the night, but he might collapse many times in a month with what he called flu".
In 1930, while in Dorset, he met the American poet and novelist Gamel Woolsey. At the time she was involved in a passionate affair with the husband of Alyse Gregory. In 1931 they married in Rome and went to live in Spain. Brenan had one child, a daughter, Miranda, whose mother was Juliana Pellegrino, an unmarried girl from Yegen.
Lytton Strachey died of undiagnosed stomach cancer on 21st January 1932. His death made Dora Carrington suicidal. She wrote a passage from David Hume in her diary: "A man who retires from life does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good. I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself. Why then should I prolong a miserable existence... I believe that no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping."
Frances Marshall was with Ralph Partridge when he received a phone-call on 11th March 1932. "The telephone rang, waking us. It was Tom Francis, the gardener who came daily from Ham; he was suffering terribly from shock, but had the presence of mind to tell us exactly what had happened: Carrington had shot herself but was still alive. Ralph rang up the Hungerford doctor asking him to go out to Ham Spray immediately; then, stopping only to collect a trained nurse, and taking Bunny with us for support, we drove at breakneck speed down the Great West Road.... We found her propped on rugs on her bedroom floor; the doctor had not dared to move her, but she had touched him greatly by asking him to fortify himself with a glass of sherry. Very characteristically, she first told Ralph she longed to die, and then (seeing his agony of mind) that she would do her best to get well. She died that same afternoon."
Gerald Brenan wrote to Alix Strachey about the death of Dora Carrington: " It was proved (at the inquest) that her last letter to Ralph, found in the drawer, was written within three days of that Friday. Then instead of wearing her own yellow dressing gown, she put on Lytton's purple one and died in that. It was a kind of ritual act... She killed herself mainly, I think, to emphasise the importance of Lytton's death but time races away from that Friday and soon very few people will ever remember it. I do not know whether great tragic acts occur out of literature, but this, I feel, was not one but something childish and thoughtless and pitiful. Or perhaps it is merely that I am obliged to go on reproaching her - for the last act as for so many other acts of her life."
Brenan's first book, the picaresque novel, Jack Robinson, was published in 1933. This was followed by The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (1943), The Face of Spain (1950), The Literature of the Spanish People (1951) and South from Granada (1957). He then produced two volumes of autobiography: A Life of One's Own: Childhood and Youth (1962) and Personal Record: 1920-72 (1974).
Gerald Brenan died in Alhaurín el Grande on 19th January 1987.
