Barker, Pat (1943-…), is an English novelist best known for her Regeneration trilogy. The three novels are set during World War I (1914-1918) in England. They explore the psychological injury that the brutality of warfare inflicted on both soldiers and civilians.
The Regeneration trilogy consists of Regeneration (1991); The Eye in the Door (1993); and The Ghost Road (1995), which won the Booker Prize, England’s best-known literary award. Barker based her novels on actual accounts of wartime experiences and research on men psychologically damaged by the war. The central character is a real person, the British psychologist and anthropologist William H. R. Rivers. Key characters in the first novel are the English poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Patricia Barker was born on May 8, 1943, in Thornaby-on-Tees, an industrial town in northern England. Her first three novels were realistic portraits of the grim life of working-class women in a city like her birthplace. The novels were Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984), and The Century’s Daughter (also published as Liza’s England, 1986).
Barker’s fourth novel, The Man Who Wasn’t There (1989), departed from her studies of struggling working-class women. The main character is a fatherless 12-year-old boy who creates fantasies to ease the pain of dealing with his father’s absence. Barker’s novel Another World (1998) is a complex family chronicle that shifts between a troubled present and the violence of World War I. Border Crossing (2001), a novel set in northern England, is a portrait of a charming but violent young man. Double Vision (2003) deals with wars of the late 1900’s and early 2000’s as seen through the eyes of two British journalists. Life Class (2008), Toby’s Room (2012), and Noonday (2016) are a trilogy of novels about three English artists that begins just before World War I and continues into the early years of World War II (1939-1945). The Silence of the Girls (2018) tells the story of Homer’s Greek epic The Iliad from the viewpoint of the Trojan women captured when Greeks invaded their city.
