Forrest Reid - Works and Influences

Works and Influences

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); his collection of original illustrations from that time are 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 (novelist), 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 of Reid's portraits, now all in the possession of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.

He published articles in many magazines, including Uladh, the Westminster Review and the Ulster Review, and he reviewed books for the Manchester Guardian. Apostate, an autobiography, was published in 1926, and its sequel, Private Road, was published in 1940. He was a founder member of the Irish Academy of Letters.