Faith of a novelist : religion in John Galsworthy's work

Abstract

Most readers are familiar with the

British author John Galsworthy (1867-1933) through his The Forsyte Saga

(1922), A Modern Comedy (1929) and The End of the Chapter (1934). He

wrote many other novels as well, and in his own times he was also known as a leading dramatist. Literary criticism and scholarly publications on Galsworthy’s work have focused predominantly on social abuse, hypocrisy and Victorian morality and the typically fin-de-siècle theme of the changing times. Less attention has been given to Galsworthy’s religious and philosophical development. This dissertation aims to fill this gap. It describes Galsworthy’s development from a biographical, literary, cultural and historical perspective and determines what writers and thinkers have influenced his thinking. The most important writers in this connection are Dickens, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Flaubert, De Maupassant and France. The thinkers that had a significant influence on Galsworthy are Emerson, Arnold, Huxley and Spencer. However, it was especially Henri Bergson’s L’Evolution créatrice (1907) that was to have a marked influence on Galsworthy’s philosophical views on such concepts as determinism versus free will, creation and man’s place within the grand design of the universe.