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‘that little, very old, very charming, if inconvenient farmhouse… It was a friendly dwelling where you had to mind your head in connection with beams; and from whose windows you watched ducks and cats and lambs in the meadows beyond.’¹
John Galsworthy on ‘The Pent’ farmhouse, Postling.

Novelist and playwright John Galsworthy was born in Surrey in 1867 and read Law at Oxford before being called to the bar in 1890. He figures in Virginia Woolf’s notorious essay ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’ as a representative of an otiose literary standard. When Woolf suggests ‘that we range Edwardians and Georgians into two camps’, placing ‘Mr Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy’ against Mr. Forster, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Joyce, and Mr. Eliot, the direction of critical travel is immediately clear.

In an odd parallel with fellow dramatist and author Jerome K. Jerome, he married the wife of his first cousin when her abusive marriage ended in divorce in 1905. It is unclear whether the two men met, but Jerome’s daughter Rowena would later act in at least one of Galsworthy’s plays and Jerome himself contributed to Galsworthy’s Reveille in aid of disabled sailors and soldiers, in 1915.

While Galsworthy never lived in Kent, he spent time in the county from the 1890s. Joseph Conrad, whom he first met in 1893, introduced him to the writer and critic Edward Garnett and Galsworthy became a frequent visitor at the Cearne, Garnett’s house in Limpsfield Chart.² It was Conrad who asked Ford Madox Ford if he could bring ‘Jack’ to meet him at his farmhouse near Hythe.³

Between 1898 and 1905, when Conrad himself lived in the house, Galsworthy became a regular visitor. As he later put it, ‘In Conrad’s study at the Pent we burned together many midnight candles, much tobacco.’⁴

H. G. Wells would also provide a sustaining literary friendship over the years. M. V. Marrot’s The Life and Letters of John Galdsworthy includes a photograph ‘taken by H. G. Wells in Hythe in 1898’. Galsworthy’s most famous work, The Forsyte Saga, is disappointingly bare of references to Kent. That is, unless we count the brief interlude when June Forsyte is taken to Broadstairs to recover from her broken engagement to Phil Bosinney. This well-intentioned scheme has no effect whatsoever, and a heartbroken June soon makes an excuse to get back to London. Galsworthy himself died at his home in Hampstead on 31 January 1933.

This article was published 29 August 2025.

Bibliography

Dupré, Catherine. John Galsworthy: a Biography. London: Collins, 1976.
Ford, Ford Madox. It Was The Nightingale. Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott, 1933.
Galsworthy, John. ‘Reminiscences of Conrad’ from Castles in Spain. 99-126. Fredonia Books. Printed from the 1927 edition.
Harvey, Geoffrey. ‘Galsworthy, John (1867–1933)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biograhpy,2006.
Marrot, M. V. The Life and Letters of John Galdsworthy. London: William Heinemann, 1935.
Woolf, Virginia. ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’. London: Hogarth Press, 1924.

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