JOHN GALSWORTHY

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) was educated at

Harrow and studied law at New College, Oxford.
He travelled widely and at the age of twenty-eight
began to write, at first for his own amusement. His
first stories were published under the pseudonym
John Sinjohn and later were withdrawn. He
considered The Island Pharisees (1904) his first
important work. As a novelist Galsworthy is
chiefly known for his roman fleuve, The Forsyte
Saga. The first novel of this vast work appeared in
1906. The Man of Property was a harsh criticism
of the upper middle classes, Galsworthy’s own
background. Galsworthy did not immediately
continue it; fifteen years and with them the First
World War intervened until he resumed work on
the history of the Forsytes with In
Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). Meanwhile he had written a considerable number of
novels, short stories, and plays. The Forsyte Saga was continued y the three volumes of A
Modern Comedy, The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), Swan
Song (1928), and its two interludes A Silent Wooing and Passersby(1927). To these
should be added On Forsyte Change (1930), a collection of short stories. With growing
age, Galsworthy came more and more to identify himself with the world of his novels,
which at first he had judged very harshly. This development is nowhere more evident
than in the author’s changing attitude toward Soames Forsyte, the «man of property»,
who dominates the first part of the work.

Galsworthy was a dramatist of considerable technical skill. His plays often took up
specific social grievances such as the double standard of justice as applied to the upper
and lower classes in The Silver Box (1906) and the confrontation of capital and labor
in Strife (1909). Justice (1910), his most famous play, led to a prison reform in England.
Galsworthy’s reaction to the First World War found its expression in The Mob (1914), in
which the voice of a statesman is drowned in the madness of the war-hungry masses; and
in enmity of the two families of The Skin Game (1920).
 VIRGINIA WOOLF
Virginia Woolf was an English author,
feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic,
considered as one of the foremost
modernists of the twentieth century along
with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James
Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Her parents
were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904),
who was a notable historian, author, critic
and mountaineer, and Julia Prinsep
Duckworth (1846–1895), a renowned
beauty. According to Woolf's memoirs,
her most vivid childhood memories were
not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall,
where the family spent every summer
until 1895. This place inspired her to write one of her masterpieces, To the Lighthouse.

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister
Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. However,
it was the death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was
briefly institutionalized. Some scholars have suggested that her mental instability was
also due to the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their
half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth.

Woolf came to know the founders of the Bloomsbury Group. She became an active
member of this literary circle. Later, Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on
10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their
engagement as a "penniless Jew") the couple shared a close bond.

Virginia's most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own
(1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if
she is to write fiction." In some of her novels, she moves away from the use of plot and
structure to employ stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the psychological aspects of
her characters.

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the
Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. On
28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into
the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's body was not found until 18
April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of
Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
 JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE
J.M. Synge, in full John Millington Synge, (born
April 16, 1871, Rathfarnham, near Dublin,
Ireland—died March 24, 1909, Dublin), leading
figure in the Irish literary renaissance, a poetic
dramatist of great power who portrayed the harsh
rural conditions of the Aran Islands and the western
Irish seaboard with sophisticated craftsmanship.

After studying at Trinity College and at the Royal

Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, Synge pursued
further studies from 1893 to 1897 in Germany, Italy,
and France. In 1894, he abandoned his plan to
become a musician and instead concentrated on
languages and literature. He met William Butler
Yeats while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris in
1896. Yeats inspired him with enthusiasm for the
Irish renaissance and advised him to stop writing
critical essays and instead to go to the Aran Islands and draw material from life. Already
struggling against the progression of a lymphatic sarcoma that was to cause his death,
Synge lived in the islands during part of each year (1898–1902), observing the people and
learning their language, recording his impressions in The Aran Islands (1907) and basing
his one-act plays In the Shadow of the Glen (first performed 1903) and Riders to the Sea
(1904) on islanders’ stories. In 1905, his first three-act play, The Well of the Saints, was
produced.

Synge’s travels on the Irish west coast inspired his most famous play, The Playboy of the
Western World (1907). This morbid comedy deals with the moment of glory of a peasant
boy who becomes a hero in a strange village when he boasts of having just killed his
father but who loses the villagers’ respect when his father turns up alive. In protest against
the play’s unsentimental treatment of the Irishmen’s love for boasting and their tendency
to glamorize ruffians, the audience rioted at its opening at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Riots
of Irish Americans accompanied its opening in New York (1911), and there were further
riots in Boston and Philadelphia. Synge remained associated with the Abbey Theatre,
where his plays gradually won acceptance, until his death. His unfinished Deirdre of the
Sorrows, a vigorous poetic dramatization of one of the great love stories of Celtic
mythology, was performed there in 1910.

In the seven plays he wrote during his comparatively short career as a dramatist, Synge
recorded the colorful and outrageous sayings, flights of fancy, eloquent invective, bawdy
witticisms, and earthy phrases of the peasantry from Kerry to Donegal. In the process, he
created a new, musical dramatic idiom, spoken in English but vitalized by Irish syntax,
ways of thought, and imagery.
 SAMUEL BECKETT
Samuel Beckett was an Irish novelist, essayist, poet and
playwright, born on 13th April 1906 in Foxrock, Dublin.
His father William Frank Beckett was a civil engineer
and mother May Barclay was a housewife. They were
member of the Church of Ireland. Beckett went to
Trinity College and studied English, Italian and French
from 1923 to 1927. He got his Bachelor’s degree from
there and taught at the Campbell College in Belfast after
which he started teaching in Paris at the ‘École Normale
Supérieure’ as a lecturer.

While Beckett was in Paris he met James Joyce, the

author of the highly criticized novel ‘Ullyses’, through
another close friend of his. Beckett developed
profoundness for Joyce who would have a great effect on Beckett’s life to come.

The first short story by Beckett was ‘Assumption’. Beckett won a small prize for his poem
‘Whoroscope’ which was about the biography of René Descartes. He returned to Ireland
for a brief time period where he taught at the Trinity College but resigned after only four
terms had passed. He started traveling throughout Europe but finally settled in Paris in
1937. During his travels he did not stop writing. He published his novel ‘Proust’ in 1931
while in England. Following this was his first novel ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’
which was published finally after many rejections in 1993. This novel laid the base for
many of Becketts works including his collection of short stories ‘More Pricks than Kicks’.

‘Recent Irish Poetry’ and ‘Humanistic Quietism’ were two of the essays reviewed and
published by Beckett. In 1935 Becketts poetic skills were seen and read by the public in
his book of poetry ‘Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates’. In 1938, Beckett was stabbed
in the chest, the knife barely missing his heart but still doing severe damage. He was
rushed to the hospital where when he woke up saw his friend James Joyce by his side.
During his stay at the hospital, Beckett grew close to one of his old acquaintances, a
French woman named ‘Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil’ who he married in 1961 in
England.

The death of James Joyce and the invasion of the Nazis brought great grief to his heart.
During 1946 to 1950, Beckett underwent a change in his ideas and even his writings. He
wrote mainly in the French language and translated the books himself in English. His
books ‘Molloy’ (1951), ‘Malone Dies’ (1951), and ‘The Unnamable’ (1953), written with
brilliance and a remarkable pace, were the greatest prose writings of the time. They show
a very bleak but incredibly oblique and strenuous course of the human life. Beckett’s play
‘Waiting for Godot’ became the reason for the rise in his fame. ‘Endgame’ (1958),
‘Happy Days’ (1961) and ‘Play’ (1963) were some of the other plays written by him.

Having received many prestigious awards the most notable being the Nobel Prize (1969),
Beckett died on 22nd December 1989.
 AGATHA CHRISTIE
Agatha Christie (15 September 1890 – 12
January 1976) was an English writer of crime
and romantic novels. She is best remembered
for her detective stories including the two
diverse characters of Miss Marple and Hercule
Poirot. She is considered the best selling writer
of all time. Only the Bible is known to have
outstripped her collected sales of roughly four
billion worldwide copies. Her works have been
translated into more languages than any other
individual writer.

Agatha Christie began writing in 1920, after the

end of the First World War. Her first story was The Mysterious Affair at Styles, (1920).
This featured the soon to be famous detective – Hercule Poirot, who at the time was
portrayed as a Belgian refugee from the Great War. The book sold well and helped meet
the public’s great appetite for detective novels. It was a genre that had been popularized
through Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories at the turn of the century.

Agatha Christie went on to write over 40 novels featuring the proud and immaculate
Hercule Poirot. Like Conan Doyle, Christie had no great love for her own creation –
Poirot seemed to be admired by the public more than the writer herself. Agatha Christie
preferred her other great detective – the quiet but effective old woman – Miss Marple.
The character of Miss Marple was based on the traditional English country woman – and
her own relatives.

The plot of Agatha Christie’s novels could be described as formulaic. Murders were
committed by ingenious methods – often involving poison, which Agatha Christie had
great knowledge of. After interrogating all the main suspects, the detective would bring
all the participants into some drawing room before explaining who was the murderer. The
psychological suspense of the novels and the fact readers feel they have a good chance of
solving the crime undoubtedly added to the popularity of the books.

During the Second World War, Christie worked in the pharmacy of the University
College London, which gave her ideas for some of her murder methods. After the war,
her books continued to grow in international popularity. In 1952, her play The Mousetrap
was debuted at the Ambassador’s Theatre in London and has been performed without a
break ever since. Her success led to her being honored in the New Year’s honor list. In
1971, she was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire.

She died in 1976 aged 85.