Alternative Ulster

Forrest Reid, the ‘Marcel Proust of Ormiston Crescent’.

The twentieth century literature of northern Ireland was substantially and understandably dominated by one subject matter, namely the formal invention in 1922 of ‘Northern Ireland’, and the various forceful consequences of same. For that reason it has perhaps been too easy to hold a writer such as Forrest Reid (1875-1947) in a marginal regard. And yet this is a character to whom E.M. Forster once referred as ‘the most important man in Belfast.’

Reid’s published writing life straddled the partition of Ireland, and so to some extent he may have been rather overlooked in a melee; but more importantly he was a man out of time. Though in a sense he never left Belfast (other than for his studies at Cambridge) and made home for most his life at 13 Ormiston Crescent, his inner universe was intensely fired by the spirit and aesthetics of ancient Greece, and through his mind’s eye he transformed the landscape of Ulster into a sort of Arcadia.