Gerald Brenan was a writer, traveller and scholar who became the outstanding Hispanist of his generation. At a time when Spain was little known in the outside world, Brenan wrote about all aspects of Spanish life, from the minutiae of everyday life in a

to a masterly analysis of the bitter political conflicts that divided the country in the period leading to the Spanish Civil War (1936-9).

As Brenan observes in his The Spanish Labyrinth, Spain had been the centre of a vast and rich overseas empire in the Golden Age of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. However, after living for centuries off the declining wealth of its colonies without developing alternative means of production, Spain had entered a period of economic and social decline. In 1898, in a war with the United

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Citation: Early, Patrick. "Gerald Brenan". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 April 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=14049, accessed 23 November 2024.]