The
Patrician
by John Galsworthy |
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| About The Author: |
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John Galsworthy
(1867-1933)
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. |
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