As Anthony West put it: "In the context of his time, he was, for his class, a master storyteller."
John Galsworthy's roots, on his father's side, were in Devon. His grandfather, a prosperous Plymstock merchant, came to London in 1833 and quickly increased his wealth by investing shrewdly in local real estate. John Galsworthy III, the novelist's father, was not only a practicing solicitor but a skilled businessman in his own right. "Old John" Galsworthy served as a director of several firms and also bought, sold, and managed a good deal of property in and around London. When he died in 1904 at the age of eighty-seven, he left an estate valued in the six figures, a generous portion of which provided each of his four children with a handsome legacy and a lifelong annuity. Galsworthy was devoted to his father, whose relentless business sense was paralleled by the unfailing gentleness he showed his children. In an autobiographical sketch written in 1919, Galsworthy observed that "my father really predominated in me from the start, and ruled my life. I was so truly and deeply fond of him that I seemed not to have a fair share of love left to give my mother (Blanche Bartleet Galsworthy)." As Alec Frechet points out, Galsworthy "admitted his mother's charm, elegance, taste, distinction, goodness: in short her nobility of character"; but his novels implicitly show that he could not tolerate her "lack of critical spirit, her dreadful conventionalism in every way, her maternalism." Indirectly, then, says Frechet, Mrs.
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