His brooding good looks and claims of Iroquois ancestry attracted both sexes. While the two convalesced from shell-shock in the Scottish borders, the British poet and aristocrat Siegfried Sassoon fell deeply in love with him. Sassoon introduced Prewett to the cream of the British literary world and Prewett took up residence in the fabulous Oxfordshire home of the “daughter of a thousand earls”, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Virginia Woolf published Prewett’s poetry, he was painted by Dorothy Brett and befriended by Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves.

Amidst the heady vertigo of pandemic-ridden, post-war England, this remarkable Canadian became the toast of elite British literary society—that is, until it all crashed around his ears.

JOY PORTER is Leverhulme Major Research Fellow and PI of the Treatied Spaces Research Group at the University of Hull, U.K. (treatiedspaces.com) where she researches Indigenous, environmental, and diplomatic themes in an interdisciplinary context. Fascinated by the mind, by what makes us love, persevere, transcend and escape the legacies of conflict, her work exposes how culture impacts the world.

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