62 Facts About John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright.

John Galsworthy is best known for his trilogy of novels collectively called The Forsyte Saga, and two later trilogies, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter.

John Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.

John Galsworthy was thirty before his first book was published in 1897, and did not achieve real success until 1906, when The Man of Property, the first of his novels about the Forsyte family was published.

John Galsworthy's plays are seldom revived, but his novels have been frequently reissued.

John Galsworthy was born on 14 August 1867 at his family's home, Parkfield on Kingston Hill in Surrey.

John Galsworthy was the second child and elder son of the four children of John Galsworthy and his wife Blanche Bailey nee Bartleet.

John Galsworthy became the model for Old Jolyon, the patriarch in The Forsyte Saga; looking back, Galsworthy said in 1919, "I was so truly and deeply fond of him that I seemed not to have a fair share of love left to give to my mother".

John Galsworthy was educated by a governess until he was nine.

John Galsworthy was happy there, and his happiness increased when his younger brother, Hubert, was sent to join him.

John Galsworthy became a member of the school football team, and captain of his house XI.

John Galsworthy joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and acted in other amateur productions, in one of which he fell in love with a fellow performer, Sybil Carlisle ; his ardent feelings were not reciprocated, which caused him much angst.

John Galsworthy concluded his time at Oxford with a second-class honours degree, awarded in 1889.

John Galsworthy was admitted to Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in the Easter term of 1890.

Holloway comments that as the son of a leading solicitor, John Galsworthy was in an excellent position for a young barrister.

John Galsworthy was nonetheless unenthusiastic about practising as a barrister.

John Galsworthy's father arranged further foreign trips to distract him from his emotional troubles and to develop his legal education by studying aspects of maritime law at close quarters with a view to specialising in it once back at home.

In 1904 John Galsworthy went to Russia, where his father had financial interests, before returning to England, supposedly to resume his career as a barrister.

John Galsworthy remained unenthusiastic about working as a lawyer: "I read in various Chambers, practised almost not at all, and disliked my profession thoroughly".

At this stage of his life John Galsworthy was under no pressure to earn a living, having an adequate allowance from his father, but although he disapproved of an idle existence, he had no clear idea of what he wished to do.

In 1895 John Galsworthy began a love affair with the wife of his cousin Arthur John Galsworthy.

Ada John Galsworthy had married Arthur in 1891, but they had little in common and quickly drifted apart; within a year they had agreed to live separately.

Ada encouraged John Galsworthy to become a writer, as did his two sisters, Lilian and Mabel, close friends of Ada.

John Galsworthy published his first work of fiction in 1897, when he was aged 30.

John Galsworthy later said that he was writing fiction for five years before he mastered even the basic techniques.

John Galsworthy studied the works of Turgenev and Maupassant, learning from their literary craftsmanship.

In 1904 John Galsworthy's father died, and there was no longer any cause for secrecy about his son's relationship with Ada.

At this stage, John Galsworthy had only tentative thoughts of expanding the novel into the family saga and social panorama of The Forsyte Chronicles.

Alongside his work as a novelist and playwright, John Galsworthy was a vigorous campaigner for causes in which he believed.

The Silver Box was the first of 28 plays John Galsworthy wrote for the professional stage.

Between 1906 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, John Galsworthy had nine plays produced and published five novels.

John Galsworthy was appalled that civilised countries should be at war with each other, but thought it right to defend Belgium against German invasion.

John Galsworthy's family was directly affected by the war: his sister Lily was married to a German, the painter Georg Sauter, who was interned as an enemy alien and later expelled.

John Galsworthy was too old to serve in the army and felt increasingly that he was not contributing enough to the war effort.

John Galsworthy donated his substantial American royalties to war charities, but in addition he felt impelled to offer his services in a personal capacity.

John Galsworthy trained as a masseur and went to France as a volunteer, giving therapy to injured soldiers at the Hopital Benevole in Martouret, near Valence.

John Galsworthy's wife went with him, helping with the hospital's laundry.

Revisiting the theme of the Forsyte family in 1917, John Galsworthy wrote a short story, "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" depicting the serene final days of Old Jolyon, the head of the family in The Man of Property.

John Galsworthy resumed much of his pre-war lifestyle, combining literary output, socialising, and promoting the causes in which he believed.

John Galsworthy supported prison reform, women's rights, a minimum wage and animal welfare, and opposed censorship, exploitation of workers, blood sports and aerial warfare.

John Galsworthy had included essays on some of these topics in his 1916 collection A Sheaf.

In 1919 the American Academy of Arts and Letters invited John Galsworthy to give an address at the celebrations marking the centenary of James Russell Lowell.

At the St Martin's Theatre, London, in 1920 John Galsworthy had his first big box-office success with The Skin Game, depicting the clash between old and new money, attempted blackmail, and the effect of unrestrained capitalism on the lives of ordinary people.

Reviews were generally favourable, although The Evening Standard said that the author's dramatic genius lent undeserved credibility to an essentially unrealistic plot, and The Observer commented that instead of seeing the good in both sides of an argument as he usually did, John Galsworthy here depicted the bad in both.

Archer wrote that the play contained some of the most thrilling passages in modern drama, and showed John Galsworthy to be a born dramatist.

The house has extensive views across farmland to the South Downs, where John Galsworthy used to ride.

Between 1926 and 1928 John Galsworthy worked on the second Forsyte trilogy.

John Galsworthy interspersed the novels with two short "interludes": A Silent Wooing and Passers By.

John Galsworthy found himself drawn back to the Forsyte family, and in 1930 he published On Forsyte 'Change, a collection of short stories about them, dealing with events before and soon after those recorded in the Saga.

John Galsworthy's health declined as he was working on Over the River, and, hitherto a fluent writer, he found progress slow and effortful.

John Galsworthy was by then too ill to go to Stockholm for the presentation, and died at his London home on 31 January 1933, aged 65, from a combination of causes including cerebral thrombosis, arterial sclerosis and a possible brain tumour.

John Galsworthy wrote 20 novels; 28 completed plays; five collections of short stories; three volumes of poetry; eleven volumes of essays and sketches; and occasional stories and pamphlets, newspaper articles, unpublished essays and sketches.

John Galsworthy's censure was seen in conservative circles as scandalous, and the author was regarded by some as a traitor to his own class.

Frechet comments that the recurring themes of John Galsworthy's novels are, in order of importance, beauty, love and suffering, divorce, honour, art and the law.

Unlike Maugham, who abandoned the theatre thirty years before the end of his writing career, John Galsworthy continued writing plays until his last years, from The Silver Box in 1906 to The Roof in 1929.

The Times commented that John Galsworthy was a dramatist of power with more feeling than Shaw, if less wit, "and as keen a sense of social anomalies, if less readiness to offer theories by which they might be remedied".

John Galsworthy seldom took sides; he was known for seeing both sides of most arguments and rarely giving any characters a monopoly of virtue or wisdom.

Some critics felt that John Galsworthy was apt to show the underdog in a sympathetic light even when the character deserved little sympathy.

John Galsworthy was an accomplished writer of short stories; the most popular collection is Five Tales.

Gilbert Murray thought that the Collected Poems, posthumously published, showed that John Galsworthy could have been a considerable poet if he had not already found his milieu in prose.

John Galsworthy insisted on living on only half his income, and gave the other half away in such causes as providing affordable homes for villagers in Manaton and Bury.

The publisher Rupert Hart-Davis thought that John Galsworthy's touch grew less sure with each succeeding generation of the Forsytes: in the Saga the author could draw on his contemporaries and immediate forebears as models: the Forsytes are an upper-middle-class family like John Galsworthy's own, two generations removed from their yeomen roots in the West Country; Ada's first marriage provided a basis for Irene and Soames Forsyte.