John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright.

He was born on 14 August 1867 into the family of a wealthy lawyer. He studied law at the privileged Harrow School and then at Oxford University. However, Galsworthy evidently did not see himself in this profession and, instead of beginning a career in law, went abroad to travel, where he was formally supposed to oversee the family shipping business. His passion for reading and travel outweighed the respectability and prestige of legal service, and his interest in literature became the work of his life.

During his travels, John met Joseph Conrad on a voyage from Australia; Conrad was then first mate, and the two became close friends. It was Galsworthy who persuaded Conrad to publish his travel stories, becoming in a sense the catalyst for the latter’s literary career.

In 1897 Galsworthy’s first collection, From the Four Winds, was published, followed by the novels Jocelyn (1898) and Villa Rubein (1900), marked by the influence of late English Romanticism. However, even then Galsworthy conceived the idea that he would pursue for more than 30 years: to create a cycle of realistic novels about the fate of a large bourgeois family. His artistic taste was greatly influenced by Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. In the multi-volume epic The Forsyte Saga (1901–1933), Galsworthy included the novella The Salvation of a Forsyte (1901), the novel The Man of Property (1906), the novellas Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918) and Awakening (1920), and the novels In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). These works formed the first part of the trilogy The Forsyte Saga, published in 1922.

In 1905 Galsworthy married Ada Pearson, the former wife of his cousin. For ten years before this marriage, Galsworthy had