The Island Pharisees
by John Galsworthy
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The first novel that John Galsworthy published under his own name (rather than a pseudonym), The Island Pharisees was also the first of many of his works to focus on social issues. Born into an upper-class family and afforded the very best, a man named Shelton now finds himself on the brink of marriage. But a chance encounter with an eccentric character called Ferrand turns every assumption underpinning Shelton's life choices inside out..
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1919. 1909. This was basically about class. The main character, Richard Shelton, realizes his whole class is populated with phonies pretending there are no problems in the world because they have money and they don't have to see them. He sees the problems in society, especially for the poor. As a result of his accidental association with a few poor people, he finds he is unable to be a proper, phony, good British citizen. He rejects the idea that Britain is good and that his class is good and becomes something of a moral outcast. There the book ends and I can't imagine what he'll do with his life. It was a stark contrast to E. Phillips Oppenheim's always proper Britishers whom I usually read about. Shelton was real.
Depicting the upper middle class, Galsworthy describes this as his best work.
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346+ Works 11,788 Members
At age 28, after a gentlemanly education at Harrow and Oxford, and a training at law, Galsworthy settled into simultaneous careers as a novelist and a playwright. The Silver Box, Galsworthy's first successful drama, was staged in 1906, the year he published the first volume of what was to become The Forsyte Saga. His one-word titles - Justice show more (1910), Strife (1909), Loyalties (1922)---suggest the nature of Galsworthy's artistic ambition: to generalize a social indictment, keeping faith with the objective methods of naturalism. In each, Galsworthy favors an austere irony and unresolvable situations, and balanced moral positions are displayed in the cabinetwork of "well-made" playwrighting. Reputed to have led to reforms in its time, his realism today seems contrived to produce aesthetic distance and a sense of resignation that is precisely what contemporary political dramatists strain hardest to avoid. Not surprisingly, critics have come away from revivals with the sense that (especially in his spare language) Galsworthy anticipates Harold Pinter rather than more socially engaged playwrights. Galsworthy wrote novels and plays alternately throughout his life. His masterwork, The Forsyte Saga, begun in 1906 and finished in 1928, and consisting of six separate novels and two linking interludes, is the most famous example of the sequence novel in English literature. It is a study of the property sense, the possessive spirit, in different individuals and generations of English middle-class society. He also completed a second trilogy dealing with the Forsyte family, called A Modern Comedy (1928). His last trilogy, a study of the Charwell family, is called End of the Chapter (1933). Galsworthy's later years brought him many honors, including the presidency of P.E.N. and honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and several other universities. After World War I, he was offered a knighthood, which he refused. He did, however, accept the Order of Merit in 1929, and in 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He was, however, too ill to attend the Nobel ceremony and died within two months of receiving the award. Although his posthumous reputation had waned, the centenary of his death, in 1967, brought a re-creation of The Forsyte Saga on British and American television in serial form. Interest in him skyrocketed, and the Forsyte novels again became bestsellers. With new popularity came fresh critical analysis. Pamela Hansford Johnson called The Forsyte Saga "a work of profound social insight and patchy psychological insight" (N.Y. Times). His critical writings include The Inn of Tranquility: Studies and Essays (1911) and Author and Critic. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Reviews
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- (3.17)
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- English, Estonian
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 29
- ASINs
- 8
