Long Fiction:
The Merry Heart, 1909
The Casement, 1911
The Happy Family, 1912
Nocturne, 1917
September, 1919
Coquette, 1921
The Three Lovers, 1922
Young Felix, 1923
The Elder Sister, 1925
Summer Storm, 1926
A Brood of Ducklings, 1928
Sketch of a Sinner, 1929
The Georgian House, 1932
Elizabeth, 1934
Harvest Comedy, 1937
The Two Wives, 1939
The Fortunate Lady, 1941
Thankless Child, 1942
A Woman in Sunshine, 1945
A Flower for Catherine, 1951
A Month in Gordon Square, 1953
The Summer Intrigue, 1955
Woman from Sicily, 1957
Tigress in the Village, 1959
The Grace Divorce, 1960
Death of a Highbrow, 1961
Quadrille, 1965
Sanctuary, 1966
Nonfiction:
George Gissing, 1912
R. L. Stevenson, 1914
Tokefield Papers, 1927
A London Bookman, 1928
The Georgian Scene, 1934 (pb. in Britain as The Georgian Literary Scene, 1935)
Swinnerton, an Autobiography, 1936
The Bookman’s London, 1951
Background with Chorus, 1956
Authors I Never Met, 1956
Figures in the Foreground: Literary Reminiscences 1917-1940, 1963
Reflections from a Village, 1969
Frank Arthur Swinnerton, born in a London suburb on August 12, 1884, was a precocious boy who avowedly taught himself to read at the age of four. A series of illnesses as a child, including diphtheria, paralysis, and scarlet fever, caused poor health through most of his later boyhood. His family frequently endured straitened circumstances, especially after his father’s death, when he and his brother became responsible for supporting the family.
He decided early to be a journalist and became an office boy for a Scottish newspaper publisher, Hay, Nisbet & Company, in 1898, at the age of fourteen. In 1900, having decided to become a man of letters rather than a journalist, he became a confidential clerk with publishers J. M. Dent. He worked there until 1907. In 1907 he joined Chatto & Windus, another British publisher, as a proofreader. In 1909, Chatto & Windus published his first novel, The Merry Heart, and made him an editor. He remained with Chatto & Windus through 1926, bringing novelists such as Aldous Huxley, A. A. Milne, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells to the firm. Before he was thirty Swinnerton had published several books, novels, and critical biographies. His first outstanding success came in 1917 with Nocturne, a short but almost perfect Cockney idyll. He went on publishing through his ninety-fourth year, completing sixty-one books, including forty-one novels. A London Bookman, Tokefield Papers, and The Bookman’s London are volumes of essays. The Georgian Scene is a work of literary criticism; it is, withHarvest Comedy, one of the two books Swinnerton considered his best.
From 1937 to 1942 Swinnerton was chief reviewer of fiction for the London Observer. During World War II he served the British government as a civil servant in the Ministry of Information. His first wife was Helen Dircks, a poet. His second wife, whom he married in 1924, was Mary Dorothy Bennett; they had one daughter. Swinnerton was considered a competent novelist and a dependable storyteller. Critics rarely were enthusiastic, but they gave measured approval to many of his works, and he was accepted as a literary personality. His books sold well.