English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. A prolific author who worked in many genres, Galsworthy is most widely recognized as a chronicler of English bourgeois society during the early twentieth century. His most acclaimed work, The Forsyte Saga, is a trilogy of novels and two short stories, featuring Soames Forsyte, a prosperous and materialistic solicitor.
Background
Galsworthy was born on a family estate in Kingston Hill, Surrey, near London. His mother was a descendant of provincial squires, while his father was of Devonshire yeoman stock. His father was a successful solicitor who had financial interests in mining companies in Canada and Russia, and who later served as the model for Old Jolyon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga. He travelled widely and at the age of twenty-eight began to write, at first for his own amusement. His first stories were published under the pseudonym John Sinjohn and later were withdrawn. In 1893 Galsworty met the writer Joseph Conrad while on a South Sea voyage, which he made in part to study maritime law. In a letter he noted: "The first mate is a Pole called Conrad, and is a capital chap though queer to look at; he is a man of travel and experience in many parts of the world, and has a fund of yarns on which I draw freely." This meeting convinced Galsworthy to give up law and devote himself entirely to writing. Years later Galsworthy helped Conrad financially. With the death of his father in 1904, Galsworthy became financially independent. In 1905 he married Ada Pearson (1864-1956), his cousin's wife. Galsworthy had lived in secret with her for ten years, because he did not want to cause distress to his father, who would not approve the relationship.They had began the affair while Ada's husband Arthur served in the Boer war. According to some biographers Galsworthy, a "decent chap" of his times, was dominated by his wife who was atrocious and hypochondriac. Ada inspired many of Galsworthy's female characters.
Education
At the age of nine, Galsworthy was sent to a boarding school and later to the prestigious Harrow School in London, where he excelled in athletics. After attending Harrow and New College, Oxford, he received his law degree in 1889 and was admitted to the bar in 1890. For a few years he traveled, practicing little law. At the age of 28 he began to write, publishing his first book, From the Four Winds, in 1897. Jocelyn (1899) and Villa Rubein (1900) were signed John Sinjohn.
Career
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.
Galsworthy wrote as an impressionist, a realist, a moral critic, and a humanitarian. In all of his novels and plays he was consistently on the side of the underprivileged, on the side of the sensitive and artistic as opposed to the materially successful, the insensitive, and the blindly practical. Tolerance, kindness, and courage were the qualities that he urged thr
All of Galsworthy's novels are imbued with a lyrical quality as well as sharpened by his satirical intelligence. He was a novelist deeply aware of the beauty that he sensed in life, as well as a social historian disturbed by the social injustice that he perceived.
