Robert Briffault (1876 – 11 December 1948) was a French-born New Zealand novelist, historian, social anthropologist and surgeon.
He was born in
NiceNice is a city in southern France located on the Mediterranean coast, between Marseille, France, and Genoa, Italy, with 347 060 inhabitants in the 2006 estimate...
,
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
. His father served as private secretary to Napoleon III. After the death of his father, Briffault and his Scottish-born mother emigrated to New Zealand. In May 1896 he married Anna Clarke; the couple had three children, Lister, Muriel, and Joan, born from 1897 to 1901.
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Robert Briffault (1876 – 11 December 1948) was a French-born New Zealand novelist, historian, social anthropologist and surgeon.
Biography
He was born in
NiceNice is a city in southern France located on the Mediterranean coast, between Marseille, France, and Genoa, Italy, with 347 060 inhabitants in the 2006 estimate...
,
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
. His father served as private secretary to Napoleon III. After the death of his father, Briffault and his Scottish-born mother emigrated to New Zealand. In May 1896 he married Anna Clarke; the couple had three children, Lister, Muriel, and Joan, born from 1897 to 1901. Briffault received his MB, ChB from the
University of DunedinThe Dunedin School of Medicine is one of three medical schools that make up the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago. All Otago University medical students who gain entry after a first year "Health Sciences" program, or who gain graduate entry spend their second and third years studying...
in
New ZealandNew Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses , and numerous smaller islands, most notably Stewart Island/Rakiura and the Chatham Islands. The indigenous Māori named New Zealand Aotearoa, commonly translated as The Land of the Long White Cloud...
in 1905 and commenced medical practice. After service on the
Western FrontWestern Front was a term used during the First and Second World Wars to describe the "contested armed frontier" between lands controlled by Germany to the East and the Allies to the West...
during
World War IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
, he settled in England, his wife having died. In the late 1920s he married again, to Herma Hoyt (1898-1981), an American writer and translator, best known for her English translations of modern French literature. The Briffaults became clients of the literary agent William Bradley and were befriended by his wife, Jenny. His book on the troubadours helped popularize the theory that they were heavily influenced by the poetry and music of Muslim Spain. Briffault debated marriage with Malinowski in the 1930s and corresponded with
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Although he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the...
. He died in
HastingsHastings is a town and Borough on the coast of East Sussex in England. It includes originally separate settlements, as well as the inevitable growth of the town through the building of new estates....
,
SussexSussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is a historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...
, England on 11 December 1948.
Asked how to pronounce his name, Briffault told
The Literary DigestThe Literary Digest was an influential general interest weekly magazine published by Funk and Wagnalls. Founded by Isaac Kauffman Funk in 1890, it eventually merged with two similar weekly magazines, Public Opinion and Current Opinion....
: "Should be pronounced
bree'-foh, without attempting to give it a French pronunciation." (Charles Earle Funk,
What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)
Works
- The Making of Humanity
- Psyche's Lamp
- The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
- Breakdown: The Collapse of Traditional Civilization
- Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927)
- Europa (1936)
- Europa: The Days of Ignorance (novel); a best selling book in the United States in 1935
- Europa in Limbo (novel)
- Marriage Past and Present
- Sin and Sex
- Les Troubadours et le sentiment romanesque (1945), rev. tr. as The Troubadours (1965)
Source