He met his future wife, Jessie Hankinson, while he was lodging at Edgbaston in Birmingham and she was training at Anstey College of Physical Education, then housed in nearby The Leasowes (the former home of William Shenstone, the author he most admired).
From 1920, the couple went to live in Capri until 1929 but also travelled widely, including trips to South Africa, the United States and summers in the Lake District of England.
This changed as Italy became fascist and war approached, and in 1937 he purchased Talland House between Looe and Polperro as an alternative winter retreat.
His first published novel Deep Sea (1914) has Brixham as a background while Portrait of Clare (1927) is set in the West Midlands, as are several of his works from this period.
The central project of Francis Brett Young's career was a series of linked novels set in a loosely fictionalised version of the English West Midlands and Welsh Borders.
[2] The Black Diamond (1921) tells the story of a labourer working on the aqueduct in the region around Knighton, while The House Under the Water (1932) deals at length with the construction of the reservoirs themselves.
They range in style from the atmospheric psychological horror of Cold Harbour (1924; praised by H. P. Lovecraft)[3] to the romantic family saga of Portrait of Clare (1927), which won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Other locations appear to be fictional conflations of various real-world places; e.g., the Black Country town of Wednesford; resembling in many respects the actual town of Wednesbury but located by the author in the Stour Valley (and seemingly unrelated to Hednesford, near Cannock), and the hamlet of Cold Harbour; modelled on Wassell Grove near Hagley[4] but described by him as overlooking the Black Country.
The archive collection includes a large number of letters, many of which are from prominent figures of the twentieth century, as well as typescript copies of his poems.