Life Class is a novel by Pat Barker

Pat Barker

Pat Barker CBE, FRSL is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres around themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. Her work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken.-Personal life:...

 released in 2007. The novel is about students at the Slade School of Art in the first years of the twentieth century, one of whom volunteers to serve in a front line hospital during the First World War.

The male character in the book appears to be loosely based on C.R.W. Nevinson and Paul Nash

Paul Nash (artist)

Paul Nash was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.-Early life:...

, and the female character loosely upon Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington

Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey....

, who were all students at the Slade at this time. David Boyd Haycock

David Boyd Haycock

David Boyd Haycock is a British writer of non-fiction. He is the author of Paul Nash , William Stukeley , Mortal Coil and A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War , a group biography of the artists Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and C.R.W...

's A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (Old Street Publishing, 2009) presents the remarkable 'true story' that lies behind Barker's novel.