John Galsworthy
British writer
born Aug. 14, 1867, Kingston Hill, Surrey, Eng.
died Jan. 31, 1933, Grove Lodge, Hampstead
Main
English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1932.
Galsworthy’s family, of Devonshire farming stock traceable to the
16th century, had made a comfortable fortune in property in the 19th
century. His father was a solicitor. Educated at Harrow and New College,
Oxford, Galsworthy was called to the bar in 1890. With a view to
specializing in marine law, he took a voyage around the world, during
which he encountered Joseph Conrad, then mate of a merchant ship. They
became lifelong friends. Galsworthy found law uncongenial and took to
writing. For his first works, From the Four Winds (1897), a collection
of short stories, and the novel Jocelyn (1898), both published at his
own expense, he used the pseudonym John Sinjohn. The Island Pharisees
(1904) was the first book to appear under his own name.
The Man of Property (1906) began the novel sequence known as The
Forsyte Saga, by which Galsworthy is chiefly remembered; others in the
same series are “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” (1918, in Five Tales), In
Chancery (1920), Awakening (1920), and To Let (1921). The saga
chronicles the lives of three generations of a large, upper middle-class
family at the turn of the century. Having recently risen to wealth and
success in the profession and business world, the Forsytes are
tenaciously clannish and anxious to increase their wealth. The novels
imply that their desire for property is morally wrong. The saga
intersperses diatribes against wealth with lively passages describing
character and background. In The Man of Property, Galsworthy attacks the
Forsytes through the character of Soames Forsyte, a solicitor who
considers his wife Irene as a mere form of property. Irene finds her
husband physically unattractive and falls in love with a young architect
who dies. The other two novels of the saga, In Chancery and To Let,
trace the subsequent divorce of Soames and Irene, the second marriages
they make, and the eventual romantic entanglements of their children.
The story of the Forsyte family after World War I was continued in The
White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), and Swan Song (1928),
collected in A Modern Comedy (1929). Galsworthy’s other novels include
The Country House (1907), The Patrician (1911), and The Freelands
(1915).
Galsworthy was also a successful dramatist, his plays, written in a
naturalistic style, usually examining some controversial ethical or
social problem. They include The Silver Box (1906), which, like many of
his other works, has a legal theme and depicts a bitter contrast of the
law’s treatment of the rich and the poor; Strife (1909), a study of
industrial relations; Justice (1910), a realistic portrayal of prison
life that roused so much feeling that it led to reform; and Loyalties
(1922), the best of his later plays. He also wrote verse.
In 1905 Galsworthy married Ada Pearson, the divorced wife of his
first cousin, A.J. Galsworthy. Galsworthy had, in secret, been closely
associated with his future wife for about ten years before their
marriage. Irene in The Forsyte Saga is to some extent a portrait of Ada
Galsworthy, although her first husband was wholly unlike Soames Forsyte.
Galsworthy’s novels, by their abstention from complicated psychology
and their greatly simplified social viewpoint, became accepted as
faithful patterns of English life for a time. Galsworthy is remembered
for this evocation of Victorian and Edwardian upper middle-class life
and for his creation of Soames Forsyte, a dislikable character who
nevertheless compels the reader’s sympathy.
A television serial of The Forsyte Saga by the British Broadcasting
Corporation achieved immense popularity in Great Britain in 1967 and
later in many other nations, especially the United States, reviving
interest in an author whose reputation had plummeted after his death.
