Forrest Reid

Forrest Reid (1875 – 1948) was a novelist, literary critic,and translator. He was, along with Hugh Walpole and J.M. Barrie, a leading pre-war British novelist of boyhood. He is still acclaimed as the greatest of Ulster novelists and was recognised with the award of the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel "Young Tom".

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Reid was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and entered Christ's College Cambridge in 1905, and was influenced there by the novelist E.M. Forster. After graduation Forster continued to visit Reid, who was then settled back in Belfast. It was to Reid, who was a homosexual,citation |title=De-Centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis |first=David |last=Shuttleton |first2=Diane |last2=Watt |first3=Richard |last3=Phillips |year=2000 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=0415194652 |page=135] that Forster felt able to write about the loss of his beloved Charles Mauron in the Second World War. In 1952 Forster travelled to Belfast to unveil a plaque commemorating Forrest Reid's life (at 13 Ormiston Crescent).

As well as his fiction, Reid also translated poems from the Greek Anthology ("Greek Authors" (Faber, 1943)). His study of the work of W.B. Yeats ("W.B. Yeats: A Critical Study" (1915)) has been acclaimed as one of the best critical studies of that poet. He also wrote the definitive work on the English woodcut artists of the 1860s; his collection of original illustrations from that time are housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

He was a close friend of Walter de la Mare, whom he first met in 1913, and about whose fiction he published a perceptive book in 1929. Reid was also an influence on novelist Stephen Gilbert, and had good connections to the Bloomsbury Group of writers. Reid was a founding member of the Imperial Art League (later the Artists League of Great Britain). Reid was also a close friend of Arthur Greeves, the artist known to be C.S. Lewis's best friend. Greeves painted several of Reid's portraits, now all in the possession of the Royal Academical Institution, Belfast.

A 'Forrest Reid Collection' is held at the University of Exeter, England; consisting of first editions of all his works and books about Reid. Many of his original manuscripts are in the archives of the Belfast Central Library.

Fiction

* "A Garden by the Sea" (1918). (Stories).
* "The Kingdom of Twilight" (1904).
* "The Garden God - a Tale of Two Boys" (1905).
* "The Bracknels - a Family Chronicle" (1911), revised as "Denis Bracknel" (1947).
* "Following Darkness" (1912) (An inspiration for James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man").
* "The Gentle Lover - A Comedy of Middle Age" (1913).
* "At the Door of the Gate" (1915).
* "The Spring Song" (1916).
* "Pirates of the Spring" (1919).
* "Pender among the Residents" (1922).
* "Demophon - a Traveller's Tale" (1927).
* "Uncle Stephen" (1931).
* "Brian Westby" (1934).
* "The Retreat" (1936).
* "Peter Waring" (1937).
* "Young Tom" (1944).

Further reading

* Paul Goldman & Brian Taylor. "Retrospective Adventures: Forrest Reid, Author and Collector" (Scholar Press, 1998).
* Colin Cruise. 'Error & Eros: The Fiction of Forrest Reid'. IN: "Sex, Nation & Dissent" (Cork University Press, 1997)
* "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-part autobiography).
* Eamonn Hughes. "Ulster of the Senses" (an essay about Reid's autobiography). IN: "Fortnight" 306 (May 1992).
* Reid, Forrest. "The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys" (1905), edited with a foreword, introduction and notes by Michael Matthew Kaylor (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2007) [http://www.valancourtbooks.com/thegardengod.html]

References

ee also

*List of Northern Irish writers