time that his plays were embraced in the communist world. Priestly was offered a knighthood and a life peerage but insisted on remaining a man of the people and refused them. In 1973, however, he received the conferment of the Freedom of the City of Bradford. In 1977, he accepted membership in the Order of Merit, a prestigious honor limited to twenty-four living Britons, privately expressing the opinion that it had come too late to bring him satisfaction for very long. Nevertheless, Priestley lived to enjoy the honor for seven years.

After attempting comedies of manners in such works as The Roundabout and Duet in Floodlight but rejecting the mode as a shallow one, Priestley revealed that the influences on his drama were more Continental than native. Specifically, he attempted to demonstrate, like dramatist Henrik Ibsen, that the present is the inevitable result of the deeds and actions of one’s past. The present, in turn, inevitably colors the future. Here, too, the reader can detect the effect of theorizing about time as a fourth dimension in which human beings live. The single most important influence on Priestley’s drama, however, was the dramatist Anton Chekhov. Like Chekhov’s dramas, Priestley’s best plays capture and sustain an elegiac atmosphere in which imperfect individuals lose their way but also touch others and their families with love. Again like Chekhov, the dramatist could love his characters despite their failings, but unlike Chekhov, Priestley did not always successfully universalize his situations. Whereas Vishnyovy sad (pr., pb. 1904; The Cherry Orchard, 1908) becomes a metaphor reaching beyond Russia to evoke a world, Eden End remains a view of provincial England. As a result, Priestley never touched American audiences as he did his own people. Nevertheless, in such plays as Eden End, Cornelius, and The Linden Tree, Priestley evoked a sense of loss more subtly than any dramatist since Chekhov.

Exploring the family circle in such early plays as Laburnum Grove and Eden End, Priestley eventually widened his focus to the nation as family in They Came to a City and How Are They at Home? and inevitably to the world as family in Home Is Tomorrow and Summer Day’s Dream. The unifying thread through these works is the Jungian concept of the unity of all human beings, a concept most clearly expressed in such innovative plays as Johnson over Jordan and Music at Night, works that enabled Priestley to handle time and place in the fluid manner of the expressionists. Priestley, however, denied that his work was expressionistic; he preferred to believe instead that his theory of coexisting time, in which persons are at all times beyond mere chronological time, proved that expressionist “distortion” does not take place in his work.

Priestley’s experimental dramas, again influenced by Continental writers, as well as his insistence on thrusting the common person to the very center of the stage in his realistic plays, were important blows in freeing the English theater from a stultifying conservatism. Never losing sight of the fact that a dramatist must be able to entertain his audience, Priestley found the way to make audiences think as well, to face hard truths about themselves, and to confront these truths with love rather than with anger. Although the Angry Young Men who came after him mistakenly thought him to be, as Osborne has stated, an Edwardian relic, Priestley’s plays are in fact precursors of their own. Their concerns were his before them, but his voice was gentler and, unlike theirs, forgiving.

In addition to the nearly thirty novels that he published after Adam in Moonshine in 1927, J. B. Priestley wrote approximately fifty plays, on which his future reputation will largely depend. These include such memorable works as Dangerous Corner (1932), Eden End (1934), Time and the Conways (1937), An Inspector Calls (1946), The Linden Tree (1947), and The Scandalous Affair of Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon (1955). He also collaborated with Iris Murdoch on the successful stage adaptation of her novel A Severed Head (1963).

In addition, a long list of impressive works characterize Priestley as the twentieth century equivalent of an eighteenth century man of letters, a term he professed to despise. This list includes accounts of his travels both in England and abroad, the best of these being English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933 (1934), Russian Journey (1946), and Journey down a Rainbow (1955), written in collaboration with Jacquetta Hawkes. Priestley produced several books of reminiscence and recollection, which include Rain upon Godshill: A Further Chapter of Autobiography (1939), Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections (1962), and Instead of the Trees (1977). His literary criticism includes studies of George Meredith, Charles Dickens, and Anton Chekhov; and his familiar essays, thought by many to be among his finest works, are represented in the volume titled Essays of Five Decades (1968), and by Postscripts (1940), a collection of transcripts of his broadcasts in support of England at war. Priestley created several picture books of social criticism, such as The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, 1811-1820 (1969), The Edwardians (1970), and Victoria’s Heyday (1972), and his far-reaching historical surveys detail an idiosyncratic view of people in time: Literature and Western Man (1960) and Man and Time (1964). Priestley’s short-story collections include Going Up: Stories and Sketches (1950) and The Other Place, and Other Stories of the Same Sort (1953).

As this list indicates, no aspect of modern life escaped Priestley’s scrutiny, and no genre was left untried. In a long and prestigious career, he earned for himself a secure place in the annals of literature.

Although J. B. Priestley’s accomplishments in the theater may prove more significant than his work in the novel, perhaps because of his experimentation within the dramatic genre, his fiction has nevertheless secured for him a high place in contemporary literature; it has been read and cherished by a large and very appreciative audience. The Good Companions, a runaway best seller in 1929, allowed Priestley to turn his attention from journalism and the novel to the theater in the 1930’s, but he kept returning to the novel form throughout his career.

Priestley produced no novel that equals James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in scope or intellectual subtlety, no novel as prophetic as D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), no novel illustrative of the intuitive faculty equal to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), or of ethical concern equal to Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) or William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932). His place on the scale of literary achievement may be lower than theirs, but his audience has been, by and large, greater. Priestley aimed for and caught a popular audience that remained loyal to him through five decades of writing. His novels and plays have been widely translated and acted, most notably in the Soviet Union. His craft in the novel genre shows the influence of Charles Dickens, of the English Romantics, especially of William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt, and of the English music hall and its traditions. Priestley himself made no great claims for his fiction, beyond good-naturedly protesting once or twice that there is more to it than meets the top-speed reviewer’s eye. His finest novel, Bright Day, however, earned general critical approval when it was published in 1946, and merited the praise of Carl Jung, who found its theme consonant with his notion of the oneness of all people.

J. B. Priestley’s seven crime novels, including one written with Gerald Bullett, are, compared to the bulk of his published work, a minute part of the Priestley canon. Each of the novels exists independently of the others, and each is an unrepeated foray into crime fiction. The central characters are not detectives or professional police officers; they are medical doctors, artists, newspapermen, and trained professional people who are very good at their chosen work. Something piques their interest—a patient goes missing, a scientist disappears, an experiment is stolen—and they turn their obvious mental powers to the task. The books themselves, as might be expected from one of the twentieth century’s most prolific dramatists, read like scripts for stage and screen, and their visual impact is strong. Priestley’s sly wit, his socialistic philosophy, and his stagecraft mark the novels and give them the easy progress of well-written works. At the same time, in all of his crime novels, Priestley takes a cold and dispassionate look at his society and finds it less than perfect.

Is it a necessary development or an unfortunate one (or both) that so much of J. B. Priestley’s fiction has been forgotten?

Did Priestley’s attitudes toward the academic life in effect cut him off from critical acceptance?

Does a play like An Inspector Calls receive more credit now than it did in 1946? If so, why?

Can a reader learn more about the society in Priestley’s time from him than from more highly regarded writers of fiction on social issues?

What previous literary works seem to have been models for The Good Companions?