Editing John Galsworthy (section)

==Reputation==
[[File:John Galsworthy 2.jpg|thumb|alt=white man, clean-shaven, hatless, balding, in late middle age looking at camera|Galsworthy in later years]]
Galsworthy was known for his generosity. He 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.<ref>Holloway, p. 76; and Gindin, p. 528.</ref> Walpole described him as "gentle, honest and just" and "absolutely good-hearted&nbsp;... a dear",<ref>Hart-Davis, pp. 306–307.</ref> although somewhat over-serious: "A dinner with Galsworthy, [[E. V. Lucas|Lucas]], and Granville-Barker was quite fun although J. G. never sees a joke".<ref>Hart-Davis, p. 165.</ref> [[P. G. Wodehouse]] confirmed this reputation for seriousness; he wrote that Galsworthy abominated desultory conversation, and when he and his wife were entertaining dinner guests he would announce, as they sat down, a topic that would be discussed during the meal, such as "To what extent is genius influenced by the educational standards of parents?"<ref>Wodehouse and Bolton, p. 180.</ref>{{refn|Galsworthy nonetheless was consistently enthusiastic about Wodehouse's comic novels, one of his few tastes that Ada did not share.<ref>Gindin, p. 405.</ref>|group=n}}

The literary [[Literary modernism|modernists]] of his day deplored Galsworthy's books, and those of his contemporaries [[H. G. Wells]] and Arnold Bennett.<ref>Howarth, p. 5; Drabble (1974) p. 289; and Steele, p. 21.</ref> [[Virginia Woolf]] called them "the Edwardians" and accused them of presiding over an "age when character disappeared or was mysteriously engulfed".<ref>Bishop, p. 137.</ref> In her view, according to Molino, the three "ignored the complex internal life of characters" and portrayed "an orderly existence populated with characters typical of their social station, but little else."<ref name=mm/> Of the three it was Galsworthy whom Woolf most disliked. When his death was announced she wrote of her thankfulness that "that stuffed shirt" had died.<ref>Holloway, p. 1.</ref> In 1927 [[D. H. Lawrence]], although, in Fréchet's phrase, "undaunted by his lack of knowledge of the subject", published an attack on Galsworthy. "The story is feeble, the characters have no blood and bones, the emotions are faked, faked, faked. It is one great fake."<ref>''Quoted'' in Fréchet, p. 4.</ref>

The publisher [[Rupert Hart-Davis]] thought that 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 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.<ref name=odnb/> But in Hart-Davis's view, in the later novels Galsworthy had to rely on his creative imagination, "which by itself wasn't powerful enough to mask his ignorance of his juniors: perhaps if he'd had children the later books would have rung truer."<ref>Lyttelton and Hart-Davis, pp. 98–99.</ref>

In his 1979 study ''John Galsworthy: l'homme, le romancier, le critique social'', Fréchet wrote that Galsworthy's reputation is not the same in Britain as it is elsewhere: "for the English, Galsworthy represents the past, because they are so conscious of all that is anachronistic in the world he describes, and of how fast it is all changing." Fréchet suggests that readers from other countries "are much better at perceiving what remains true in Galsworthy's depiction of England, because they realise how slowly it has changed."<ref>Fréchet, p. 5.</ref>

Marking the centenary of Galsworthy's birth, the [[BBC]] made a television adaptation of the first two trilogies, screened in 1967 under the title ''The Forsyte Saga''. It was at the time the most expensive television production ever made, with 26 episodes of 50 minutes each. It attracted large audiences in Britain and forty other countries, and led to a surge in the sale of Galsworthy's novels, which sold better than at any stage in his lifetime; [[Penguin Books]] sold more than 100,000 copies of ''The Man of Property'' in Britain in 1967 and more than 120,000 the following year.<ref>Fréchet, p. 206.</ref> New translations brought the author a new international public.<ref>Fréchet, p. 6.</ref>