Editing Pat Barker (section)

===Regeneration Trilogy===
Following the publication of ''Liza's England'', Barker felt she "had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It's not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book. And I felt I'd got to that point", she said in 1992.<ref name="CLinterview" /> She said she was tired of reviewers asking "'but uh, can she do men?' – as though that were some kind of Everest".<ref>{{cite news | url=http://www6.nytimes.com/books/99/05/16/specials/barker-ghost.html | title=Shell Shock | work=New York Times Book Review | date=31 December 1995 | last=Pierpont | first=Claudia Roth | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090410075919/http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/16/specials/barker-ghost.html | archive-date=10 April 2009 | df=dmy-all | url-status=dead}}</ref>

Therefore, she turned her attention to the [[First World War]], which she had always wanted to write about due to her step-grandfather's wartime experiences. Wounded by a [[bayonet]] and left with a scar, he would not speak about the war.<ref name="CLinterview" /> She was inspired to write what is now known as the [[Regeneration Trilogy]]—''[[Regeneration (novel)|Regeneration]]'' (1991), ''[[The Eye in the Door]]'' (1993), and ''[[The Ghost Road]]'' (1995)—a set of novels that explore the history of the First World War by focusing on the aftermath of trauma. The books are an unusual blend of history and fiction, and Barker draws extensively on the writings of [[First World War poetry#World War I|First World War poets]] and [[W. H. R. Rivers]], an army doctor who worked with [[shell shock|traumatised soldiers]]. The main characters are based on historical figures, such as [[Robert Graves]], Alice and Hettie Roper (pseudonyms for [[Alice Wheeldon]] and her daughter Hettie) with the exception of Billy Prior, whom Barker invented to parallel and contrast with British soldier-poets [[Wilfred Owen]] and [[Siegfried Sassoon]]. As the central fictional character, Billy Prior is in all three books.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal|last=Dinnage|first=Rosemary|date=1996|title=Death's gray land. (Pat Barker, literature and WW1)|journal=The New York Review of Books|volume=15 February 1996}}</ref>

“I think the whole British psyche is suffering from the contradiction you see in Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, where the war is both terrible and never to be repeated and at the same time experiences derived from it are given enormous value," Barker told ''The Guardian.'' "No one watches war films in quite the way the British do."<ref>{{cite news |last=Ezard|first=John|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/1993/sep/11/fiction | title=Warring fictions| work=The Guardian | date=11 September 1993}}</ref>

Barker told freelance journalist Wera Reusch "I think there is a lot to be said for writing about history, because you can sometimes deal with contemporary dilemmas in a way people are more open to because it is presented in this unfamiliar guise, they don't automatically know what they think about it, whereas if you are writing about a contemporary issue on the nose, sometimes all you do is activate people's prejudices. I think the historical novel can be a backdoor into the present which is very valuable."<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.lolapress.org/elec1/artenglish/reus_e.htm | title=A Backdoor into the Present: An interview with Pat Barker, one of Britain's most successful novelists | last=Reusch | first=Wera | access-date=9 February 2011 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160717232814/http://www.lolapress.org/elec1/artenglish/reus_e.htm | archive-date=17 July 2016 | url-status=dead }}</ref>

''The Regeneration Trilogy'' was extremely well received by critics, with Peter Kemp of the ''Sunday Times'' describing it as "brilliant, intense and subtle",<ref>{{cite book |last1=Barker |first1=Pat |title=Regeneration |date=2008 |publisher=Penguin Books Limited |isbn=978-0-14-190643-0 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YiJOGCzq87QC |quote='Brilliant, intense and subtle' Peter Kemp, ''Sunday Times''}}</ref> and ''[[Publishers Weekly]]'' saying it was "a triumph of an imagination at once poetic and practical."<ref>{{cite news|title=The Ghost Road: 9 |url=https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-525-94191-0 |work=Publishers Weekly |date=4 December 1995}}</ref> The trilogy is described by ''[[The New York Times]]'' as "a fierce meditation on the horrors of war and its psychological aftermath."<ref>{{cite news | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/books/29book.html | title=Exploring Small Stories of the Great War | work=The New York Times | date=29 February 2008 | last=Kakutani | first=Michiko}}</ref> Novelist [[Jonathan Coe]] describes it as "one of the few real masterpieces of late 20th century [[British literature|British fiction]]."<ref name="GuardianAug03" /> British author and critic, [[Rosemary Dinnage]] reviewing in ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'' declared that it has "earned her a well-deserved place in literature"<ref name=":0" /> resulting in its re-issue for the centenary of the First World War. In 1995 the final book in the trilogy, ''The Ghost Road'', won the [[Booker Prize|Booker–McConnell Prize]].<ref>{{cite news|last1=Lyall |first1=Sarah |title=A Novel by Pat Barker Wins the Booker Prize |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/08/books/a-novel-by-pat-barker-wins-the-booker-prize.html |work=The New York Times |date=8 November 1995}}</ref>