Jocelyn

Jocelyn by John Galsworthy (1898)

Jocelyn, John Galsworthy's early novel, follows Giles Legard, an indolent, wealthy Englishman who has spent a decade in a loveless marriage to Irma, a Polish invalid, drifting through an aimless existence on the Italian Riviera. At the Hôtel Milano in Mentone, Giles falls overwhelmingly in love with Jocelyn Ley, a young, impulsive, gipsy-blooded Englishwoman traveling with her comfortable, self-absorbed aunt, Mrs. Travis. Also orbiting the group is Gustavus Nielsen, a Swedish gambler-cosmopolitan who lives by a roulette "system" and nurses his own quiet devotion to Jocelyn. Giles's passion, long suppressed by his habitual compromise with life, breaks through during shared walks, music, and the intimacy of Riviera days. Jocelyn, initially unaware, comes to recognize and return his feeling, though she is tormented by guilt toward Irma, who is fond of her and seems to intuit the growing attachment. After a symbolic near-embrace among the olive groves is interrupted by conscience, the two eventually yield to a kiss during a moonlit walk near the Pont St. Louis, crossing the line from restraint into acknowledged, illicit love. The consequences are swift and severe. Returning home in emotional turmoil, Giles enters his sleeping wife's darkened room and notices that her regular waking medicine has been misplaced, leaving only her dangerous morphia draught within reach — a chance that, if unchecked, could let a fatal "accident" occur. He flees the house without acting to prevent it, wrestling with horror at himself, then turns back partway, torn between guilt and something like relief, but arrives too late: Irma is found dead, apparently from an accidental overdose of morphia, by Nielsen. Giles is consumed by ambiguous guilt — uncertain whether he willed her death by omission — and confesses the truth of his inaction to Jocelyn. She, in turn, is stricken with the belief that she "killed" Irma, and the shared shadow of complicity poisons their love. Jocelyn insists she must separate from Giles to survive psychologically, extracting a promise that she will write to him but forbidding him to seek her out; Giles agrees to go into a self-imposed exile. The narrative then follows the two lovers living apart for nearly a year. Jocelyn returns to England with Mrs. Travis, settling into a London flat, outwardly composed but inwardly desolate, finding fleeting solace in music (Chopin, Brahms) and in Nielsen's renewed, now more prosperous and leisurely courtship — he has inherited a fortune and abandoned his gambling system. Despite genuine fondness and gratitude toward Nielsen, Jocelyn cannot open herself emotionally to him; a viewing of Watts's painting of Paolo and Francesca undoes her composure, evoking both her forbidden love for Giles and the shared damnation of their situation. She continues to write Giles brief, impersonal monthly letters as promised, though she is plagued by doubt over whether his love has endured. Giles, meanwhile, wanders restlessly through Spain, Algeria, Turkey, and the Austrian highlands, punishing himself with hard physical exertion and solitude rather than dissipation, sustained mentally only by loyalty to Jocelyn and by her monthly letters. When those letters abruptly stop for nine weeks, he is thrown into anguish and abandons his wandering to rush back to England, arriving in London determined to find her and learn the truth at last. The surviving text (the narrative as given) closes with Giles's return to London and his anticipation of confronting Jocelyn after the long separation, the resolution of their fate left to unfold from that reunion. Throughout, Galsworthy contrasts Giles's brooding, self-doubting conscience and passionate paralysis with Jocelyn's restless, fatalistic temperament — inherited, the narrative suggests, from gipsy blood — and sets both against a gallery of vividly drawn secondary figures: the comfortably selfish Mrs. Travis, the outwardly cynical but tender-hearted Nielsen, and the dying, clear-eyed Irma, whose quiet, ironic acceptance of her husband's infidelity ("have a good time, it is right, it is fitting") haunts the lovers long after her death. The novel is fundamentally a study of passion overriding social convention and personal honor, of the corrosive weight of guilt on love, and of two temperamentally opposed natures — one active and self-lacerating, the other passive and self-protective — attempting, and largely failing, to reconcile desire with conscience against the vivid, sensuous backdrop of the Mediterranean coast and the grayer, lonelier setting of London.

By John Galsworthy · First published 1898 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Romance, Psychological Fiction · 28 chapters · 68,321 words

First lines

A light laugh came floating into the sunshine through the green shutters of a room in the Hôtel Milano. It grated on Giles Legard, who sat on the stone terrace outside, face to face with a naked fact for, perhaps, the first time in ten years. He uncrossed his legs, finished his coffee, and rose listlessly, looking down the dried river bed towards the smooth sea. He was alone with the sunlight, and it laid bare his face with a convincing stare. The indifferent, gentle egotism of the man had recoiled before the meaning of things for so long, that the reality painted itself upon him harshly.

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fiction · novel · literary fiction · romance · love · marriage · relationships · English society · Victorian era · social class · family · morality

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