Forrest Reid

Born in Belfast, he was the youngest son of a Protestant family of twelve, six of whom survived. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. His father, Robert Reid (1825–1881), was the manager of a felt works, having failed as a shipowner at Liverpool,{{Cite web |url=https://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/InformationServices/TheLibrary/SpecialCollections/FileStore/Filetoupload,809270,en.pdf |title=The Correspondence of E. M. Forster and Forrest Reid: Content and Implications of a New Literary Archive |access-date=17 December 2021 |archive-date=24 June 2021 |first1=Brian G |last1=Caraher |first2=Emma |last2=Hegarty |website=Queen's University Belfast |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210624082751/https://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/InformationServices/TheLibrary/SpecialCollections/FileStore/Filetoupload,809270,en.pdf |url-status=live }} and came from a well-established upper-middle-class Ulster family; his mother, Frances Matilda, was his father's second wife. She was the daughter of Captain Robert Parr, of the 54th Regiment of Foot, of the landed gentry Parr family of Shropshire, related to Catherine Parr, last wife of King Henry VIII.A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland Vol. II, 4th edition, Sir Bernard Burke, 1863, p. 1153, Parr of Parr pedigreeThe Green Avenue: The Life and Writings of Forrest Reid, 1875-1947, Brian Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 8{{Cite ODNB|url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-35714|isbn = 978-0-19-861412-8|doi = 10.1093/ref:odnb/35714|title = The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography|year = 2004}}{{Cite web|url=https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/cddb76c9-fbe6-3b99-9f7a-7a2fe31bbabb|title=Forrest Reid Collection - Archives Hub|access-date=17 December 2021|archive-date=21 January 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210121193057/https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/cddb76c9-fbe6-3b99-9f7a-7a2fe31bbabb|url-status=live}}{{cite web | title=Guide to Print Collections – Forrest Reid Collection | work=University of Exeter | url=http://library.exeter.ac.uk/special/guides/books/reid.html | accessdate=5 July 2009 | archive-date=8 December 2019 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191208094641/http://library.exeter.ac.uk/special/guides/books/reid.html | url-status=live }} File:Forrest Reid plaque, Belfast - geograph.org.uk - 1620230.jpg Reid entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1905, graduating BA in medieval and modern languages in 1908. He returned to Belfast, and met E. M. Forster, who remained a lifelong friend, in February 1912. After graduation Forster continued to visit Reid, who was then settled back in Belfast. In 1952, Forster traveled 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 (Illustrators of the Sixties (1928)); his collection of original illustrations from that time is 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 portraits of Reid, now all in the possession of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.{{cite web | title=Forrest Reid | work=Dictionary of Ulster Biography | year=1993 | url=http://www.newulsterbiography.co.uk/index.php/home/viewPerson/1452 | accessdate=5 July 2009 | archive-date=24 November 2012 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121124004221/http://www.newulsterbiography.co.uk/index.php/home/viewPerson/1452 | url-status=live }}

A "Forrest Reid Collection" is held at the University of Exeter, 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. In 2008, Queen's University Belfast catalogued a large collection of Forrest Reid documentary material it had recently acquired, including many letters from E.M. Forster.[http://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/InformationServices/TheLibrary/FileStore/Filetoupload,139634,en.pdf Detailed listing of Forrest Reid Manuscripts held at Queen's University Belfast] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110613170245/http://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/InformationServices/TheLibrary/FileStore/Filetoupload,139634,en.pdf |date=13 June 2011 }}

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• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100614109 The Kingdom of Twilight] (1904)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001377185 The Garden God – A Tale of Two Boys] (1905)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100670953 The Bracknels – A Family Chronicle] (1911), revised as Denis Bracknel (1947)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007691406 Following Darkness] (1912)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007691407 The Gentle Lover – A Comedy of Middle Age] (1913)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100203411 At the Door of the Gate] (1915)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007691827 The Spring Song] (1916)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100681482 A Garden by the Sea] (1918)(stories)
• Pirates of the Spring (1919)
• [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006541374 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)

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Out-of-copyright works (pre-1930s) may be available at https://www.gutenberg.org Search for the author and/or the title.

• Apostate (1926)
• Private Road (1940)

Beginning in 2007, Valancourt Books began releasing editions of Reid's works, all containing new introductions by authors and scholars:

• The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys (2007), edited with a foreword, introduction and notes by Michael Matthew Kaylor
• The Tom Barber Trilogy (2011) hardcover two-volume set
• The Spring Song (2013)
• Following Darkness (2013)
• Brian Westby (2013)
• Denis Bracknel (2014)
• Pender among the Residents (2014)
• Uncle Stephen (2014)
• The Retreat (2015)
• Young Tom (2015)

• List of Northern Irish writers

{{Reflist|25em}}

• 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)
• John Wilson Foster, critical readings of Forrest Reid in Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1974), pp. 139–48, 197–211
• Eamonn Hughes, "Ulster of the Senses", Fortnight #306 (May 1992) – essay about Reid's autobiography

{{Wikiquote}}

• {{Gutenberg author |id=49537 |name=Forest Reid}}
• {{FadedPage|id=Reid, Forrest|name=Forrest Reid|author=yes}}
• {{Librivox author |id=13485}}
• Forrest Reid [https://web.archive.org/web/20150402121138/http://www.forrestreid.com/ website], including biography, photographs and links
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20160304113541/http://www.qub.ac.uk/directorates/InformationServices/TheLibrary/FileStore/Filetoupload,312674,en.pdf Catalogue from the Forrest Reid/Stephen Gilbert exhibition] (Queen's University Belfast, 2008)
• [http://www.valancourtbooks.com/forrest-reid.html Forrest Reid] at Valancourt Books
• {{cite TIWW |article= Reid, Forrest|page=216 }}

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Category:1875 births

Category:1947 deaths

Category:Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge

Category:Irish literary critics

Category:James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients

Category:Gay writers from Northern Ireland

Category:Male writers from Northern Ireland

Category:Writers from Belfast