[1] It is the first book in the Regeneration Trilogy of novels on the First World War, being followed by The Eye in the Door in 1993, and then The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995.

Using these sources, she created characters based on historical individuals present at the hospital including poets and patients, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and psychiatrist W.H.R.

Barker both drew on those texts of the period that initially inspired her and makes references to a number of other literary and cultural works and events.

In 1997, the novel was adapted by Scottish screenwriter Allan Scott into a film of the same name directed by Gillies MacKinnon and starring Jonathan Pryce as Rivers, James Wilby as Sassoon, and Jonny Lee Miller as Prior.

[3] The film was highly critically acclaimed and successful in the UK and Canada, receiving nominations for a number of awards, but failed to get the marketing and distribution in the US, so made little impact.

[3] Barker had long appreciated the literary figures she draws inspiration from in the novel: in her youth, she read the World War I poetry of Sassoon and Owen, as well as Rivers's Conflict and Dream.

[4] In a 2004 interview with literary critic Rob Nixon in the journal Contemporary Literature, Barker also states she wrote the novel, in part, as a response to how her earlier fiction was being received; she said, I felt I had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working-class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist.

[8] However, she also notes the novel accurately assesses other parts of the historical context, such as the treatment of the World War I poets' and their poetic process.

In her 2004 interview with critic Rob Nixon, Barker describes her conceptualisation of that boundary: It's not an antiwar book in the very simple sense that I was afraid it might seem at the beginning.

[9] Westman notes that Barker, at times, made deliberate choices not to preserve realism, when, for example, she omits the kinds of language and humour used by soldiers during the period.

Haunted by terrible hallucinations after being thrown into the air by an explosion and landing head first in the ruptured stomach of a rotting dead soldier, Burns experiences a revulsion to eating.

Reconciled, they take a train to the seaside and walk along the beach together, where he feels relieved, though he is distracted thinking about the plight of fellow soldiers.

While away from Craiglockhart, Rivers attends church near his brother's farm and reflects on the sacrifices of younger men in the war for the desires of the older generation.

Rivers spends his last day at the clinic saying goodbye to his patients, then travels to London and meets Dr. Lewis Yealland from the National Hospital, who will be his colleague in his new position.

Moreover, Sassoon held ambiguous feelings about his sexuality throughout his life: though he married Hester Gatty in 1933, he had several homosexual affairs after the war.

In an interview with journalist Wera Reusch, Barker called the historical Rivers "very humane, a very compassionate person who was tormented really by the suffering he saw, and very sceptical about the war, but at the same time he didn't feel he could go the whole way and say no, stop.

He is a man fundamentally at war with himself: torn between his working-class roots and his army career, between his officially acknowledged love for Sarah and his "forbidden" sexual attraction towards other men, between his violent father and his fussing mother, his longing for peace and his hatred of civilians unaffected by the horrors of trench warfare.

Burns has been unable to eat after a bomb explosion threw him headlong into the gas-filled belly of a corpse, which caused him to swallow some of the rotting flesh.

Once a surgeon, Anderson's experiences of war have made it impossible to continue practising medicine because he now hates the sight of blood after experiencing a mental breakdown.

The girlfriend of the character Billy Prior, she is working-class, "Geordie," and works in a munitions factory in Scotland producing armaments for British soldiers.

[12] She describes experiences like Burns's horrifying head first disembowelment of a corpse as allowing the readers to understand two things: first, that memories of the combatants are recorded in terms of their relationship to actual people, rather than in the vague ideas of people represented by war memorials; and second, the conceptual opposition in Western culture between flesh or body parts and the social definition of a person (for further discussion of this philosophical issue see Mind-body problem).

[7] Critic Greg Harris identifies Regeneration, along with the other two novels in the trilogy, as profiling the non-fictional experience of Sassoon and other soldiers who must deal with ideas of masculnity.

[7] These characters feel conflicted by a model of masculinity common to Britain during this time: honour, bravery, mental strength, and confidence were privileged "manly" characteristics.

[7] In an interview with Barker in Contemporary Literature, Rob Nixon distinguishes between these ideas of "manliness" and the concept of masculinity as providing a larger definition for identity.

[7] Harris highlights how this thematic treatment fairly represents how the question of masculine identity effected Sassoon and other shell-shocked World War I soldiers.

[7] Harris also describes Barker, as author, and Rivers, as a period innovator, demonstrating how the use of therapy on soldiers offers an opportunity to shape and rethink this model of masculinity.

[21] Barker describes the novel as providing a voice for the home front, stating, that "In a lot of books about war by men the women are totally silenced.

[18] Paul describes such novels, which deal explicitly with domestic effects of shell shock, as part of Barker's self-described "very much female view of war".

[13] Joyes argues the subtle use of intertextuality with Owen's works as well as other texts allows Barker to engage politically in a metatextual move similar to those identified by Linda Hutcheon in her A Poetics of Postmodernism — in which Hutcheon describes how fictional texts can question the nature of the historical process, alongside other forms of knowledge, through the means of both explicit and implicit commentary on the construction of that knowledge.

"[28] Beyond frequent praise, the main points discussed often related to the veracity of Barker's depiction of the War period and about her role as a woman writer, along with the connections of this work to her previous novels.