Re: early gender-bending: have you ever read the Gustave "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" Flaubert/ George Sand correspondance? He addresses her as "chère Maitre" - which the German version makes into "liebe Meisterin", not being able to use the female adjective and the male noun, and the whole thing is just fun to read on every level - popular novelist versus ultra-artistic super critical novelist, vivacious old lady versus gloomy man who feels aged somewhere in his 30s, busy family woman (with her sons and grandchildren, and still writing novels, of course) versus hermit, and G.S. as something like the last surviving Romantic versus Flaubert the realist/naturalist.

"Pragmatic" is not a word I'd use for WWI era Robert Graves, is all. (Nor the later one, actually, though he was trying then - but any man who has the kind of crazy personal life he had during the 20s is seriously lacking in pragmatism.) For starters, he was as shell-shocked as Sassoon and Owen, though managed to keep himself out of a hospital. (In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.) Also, leave it to R.G. to think saying "I have hallucinations, too" makes him a credible witness when testifying for Sassoon. But Barker needed someone to play the "now do be sensible, Siegfried, we're not going to change anything anyway" role, and she didn't need another soldier-poet in an intense relationship with Sasson, hence the basically two Graves scenes we get and their content.