The Japanese Quince | Introduction
Since its first publication in 1910 in the collection A Motley, John Galsworthy's "The Japanese Quince" has been popular with readers for its richly suggestive, yet subdued, narrative. The story recounts an episode from the life of Mr. Nilson, who is momentarily diverted by the sights, sounds, and smells of an early spring morning. Seized by the beauty of the natural world, Mr. Nilson is briefly lifted out of his highly regimented, well-ordered Me. Born to wealth and having lived his entire life in the Victorian English world of the upper middle class, Galsworthy wrote about what he knew. The hollow lives of his patrician characters provide the matrix for the primary pathos of his work. He once stated that "The Japanese Quince" was his attempt to "produce in the reader the sort of uneasy feeling that now and then we run up against ourselves." Like much of Galsworthy's fiction, this story has been commended for its complex insights into the ambivalence of human nature, and for its glimpse into a world that reveals its shortcomings while suggesting the possibilities for its redemption.
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