Forrest Reid

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Forrest Reid (born June 24, 1875 in Belfast , Ireland ; died January 4, 1947 in Warrenpoint , Northern Ireland ) was an Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. He was an important pre-war British author alongside Hugh Walpole and JM Barrie . Reid is still considered the greatest novelist in the province of Ulster today; In 1944 he received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Young Tom .

Youth and education

A plaque reading "Forrest Reid lived here 1924-1947" on a house on Ormiston Crescent, Belfast

Born in Belfast in 1875, he was the youngest of twelve children in a Protestant family. His mother, the second wife of his father, came from a noble family in the English county of Shropshire . Although he was proud of his parentage, he found the strict Protestant upbringing of his parents restrictive. Reid attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, a primary school in Belfast, after which he initially worked as an apprentice in the municipal tea trade and later attended Christ's College , Cambridge . There he dealt with medieval and modern speeches and found a great source of inspiration in the young writer EM Forster . Even so, Reid described his stay in Cambridge as "a fairly empty period" in his life. After graduating in 1908, he returned to Belfast to pursue his writing career; his debut, The Kingdom of Twilight , was published as early as 1904. Forster visited him in Belfast. In 1952 Forster returned to Belfast to unveil a plaque on Reid's house after his death.

Work and influence

In addition to his work as a writer, Reid also translated poems from the Greek Anthology ( Poems from the Greek Anthology (1943)). His study of the work of WB Yeats , an Irish poet ( WB Yeats: A Critical Study (1915)) was hailed as the best study of Yeats' work. Reid also wrote an authoritative work on the English woodcut scene of the 1869s ( Illustrators of the Sixties (1928)); his collection of original illustrations from this period is housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford .

Reid was a good friend of Walter de la Mare , whom he met in 1913, and wrote a book about his fiction in 1929. He influenced the novelist Stephen Gilbert and was in close contact with the Bloomsbury Group , a group of influential English artists from all fields. Reid is considered a founding member of the Imperial Art League (later the Artists League of Great Britain ). He was also a close friend of Arthur Greeves , who is known to have been CS Lewis ' best friend. Greeves drew several of the portraits of Reid now owned by the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.

Reid has published articles in many magazines such as the Westminster Review and the Ulster Review , and he has reviewed books for the Manchester Guardian . His autobiography Apostate was published in 1926, the sequel Private Road followed in 1940. He was a co-founder of the Irish Academy of Letters .

reception

Although his books nowadays are not well known, Reid was "the first novelist Ulster European format" called and there were comparisons between his Bildungsroman over Protestant Belfast, Following Darkness (1912), and James Joyce's influential novel about growing up in Catholic Dublin , A portrait of the artist as a young man (1914), drawn. In Reid's novels there are often descriptions of male beauty and love, which on the one hand has to do with his homosexuality, on the other hand with the trend in English literature of the time to express this clearly.

The University of Exeter maintains the Forrest Reid Collection, which consists of first editions of all of his publications and books about Reid. Many of his original manuscripts are stored in the archives of the Belfast Central Library . Queens's University Belfast cataloged a large collection of documentation on Forrest Reid in 2008, including many letters from EM Forster .

Publications

  • The Kingdom of Twilight . (1904)
  • The Garden God - a Tale of Two Boys . Valancourt Books , Richmond 2007, ISBN 978-1-934555-04-0 (first edition: 1905)
  • Denis Bracknel . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2014, ISBN 978-1939140975 (first edition: The Bracknels - a Family Chronicle , 1911; as Denis Bracknel  : 1947)
  • Following Darkness . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2014, ISBN 978-1939140531
  • The Gentle Lover - A Comedy of Middle Age . (1913)
  • At the door of the gate . (1915)
  • The Spring Song . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2013, ISBN 978-1-939140-22-7 (first edition: 1916)
  • A garden by the sea . (1918)
  • Pirates of the Spring . (1919)
  • Pender among the residents . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2014 (first edition: 1922)
  • Demophon - a Traveller's Tale . (1927)
  • Uncle Stephen . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2014, ISBN 978-1941147443 (First edition: 1931)
  • Brian Westby . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2013, ISBN 978-1939140654 (First edition: 1934)
  • The retreat . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2015, ISBN 978-1941147511 (First edition: 1936)
  • Peter Waring . (1937)
  • Young Tom . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2015, as eBook (first edition: 1944)
  • The Tom Barber Trilogy . Valancourt Books, Richmond 2011, ISBN 978-1934555866

See also

literature

  • Paul Goldman and Brian Taylor, Retrospective Adventures: Forrest Reid, Author and Collector (Scholar Press, 1998).
  • Colin Cruise, Error & Eros: The Fiction of Forrest Reid , Sex, Nation & Dissent ( Cork University Press , 1997)
  • Brian Taylor, The Green Avenue: the life and writings of Forrest Reid , ( Cambridge University Press , 1980).
  • Russell Burlingham, Forrest Reid: A Portrait & a Study (Faber, 1953);
  • Apostate (1926), and Private Road (1940). (Reid's two volume autobiography).
  • John Wilson Foster, critical readings of Forrest Reid in Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1974), pp. 139-148, 197-211.
  • Eamonn Hughes , Ulster of the Senses , (an essay on Reid's autobiography), Fortnight 306 (May 1992).
  • Forrest Reid, The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys (1905), supplemented with foreword, introduction and marginal notes by Michael Matthew Kaylor (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books , 2007) [1]

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Forrest Reid's website . forrestreid.com. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 25, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.forrestreid.com
  2. ↑ a b c Guide to Print Collections - Forrest Reid Collection . In: University of Exeter . Retrieved July 5, 2009.
  3. ↑ Forrest Reid . In: Dictionary of Ulster Biography (1993) . Retrieved July 5, 2009.
  4. ↑ Access to the Reid Collection (MS44) at Queen's University Belfast ; Retrieved February 3, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Reid, Forrest
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish writer, literary critic and translator
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Belfast , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
DATE OF DEATH January 4, 1947
Place of death Warrenpoint , County Down, Northern Ireland