John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was born in 1867 at Kingston Hill, Surrey, into a prosperous family; his father, a London solicitor with substantial inherited wealth, later became the model for Old Jolyon Forsyte. Educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, he was destined for the law but found it uncongenial. A long, secret relationship with Ada, the unhappy wife of his cousin Arthur, was kept hidden until his father’s death; after her divorce they married in 1905, and it was Ada who urged him to write.

He was thirty before his first book, a volume of stories printed at his own expense, appeared in 1897. Success came in 1906 with The Man of Property, the first of the Forsyte novels, and his first play, The Silver Box, which turned on the unequal treatment of rich and poor before the law. Plays such as Strife and Justice — the latter on solitary confinement — made him a leading dramatist of social conscience, and he campaigned for prison reform, animal welfare and workers’ rights while belonging to no party. Collected in 1922 as The Forsyte Saga, the family chronicle, with its sequel trilogies A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter, follows three generations of a family for whom ownership extends to art, houses and wives.

Galsworthy became the first president of International PEN in 1921 and was appointed to the Order of Merit. The Nobel Prize came in 1932, but he was too ill to travel to Stockholm and died at his Hampstead home at the end of January 1933. His ashes were scattered over the South Downs. A BBC television adaptation in 1967 revived the Forsytes for a new audience.