Early Life and Education
Born in Belfast, he was the youngest son of a Protestant family of twelve, six of whom survived. His mother, his father's second wife, came from an aristocratic Shropshire family. Although proud of this ancestry, he found the strict Protestant ethics of his immediate family constricting. Reid was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, after which he was initially apprenticed into the Belfast tea-trade before going to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he read medieval and modern languages, and was influenced by the novelist E. M. Forster. Despite this he described his Cambridge experience as 'a rather blank interlude' in life. Graduating in 1908, he returned to Belfast to pursue a writing career; his first book, The Kingdom of Twilight, had been published in 1904. After graduation Forster continued to visit Reid, who was then settled back in Belfast. In 1952 Forster travelled to Belfast to unveil a plaque commemorating Forrest Reid's life (at 13 Ormiston Crescent).
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