the novel Forsyte saga as the expression of historical situation in England.

the novel Forsyte saga as the expression of historical situation in England.

It's a credit to Galsworthy that he can communicate so much without ever getting into his characters' heads. He displays emotion in undemonstrative people like Irene through little mannerisms and twitches. At the same time, he can give us heartrending looks into aging patriarch Old Jolyon's lonely mind. His writing is very nineteenth century, dignified and with plenty of furniture/clothing details. It's pretty dense, but all right once you get used to it.
Thorny and extensive as the Forsyte family tree is, Galsworthy concentrates mainly on a few selected characters and one story line to guide the saga. It begins with a party showing the Forsytes "in full plumage" as they celebrate the engagement of June, the granddaughter of "Old" Jolyon Forsyte, the family's current living patriarch, tothe architect Philip Bosinney, who has been hired by old Jolyon's nephew, Soames Forsyte, a solicitor, to design a new house for him and his wife Irene. The problem is that Irene is bored with her marriage to Soames and has an affair with Bosinney and then (much later) with "Young" Jolyon, old Jolyon's son and Soames's cousin.
Galsworthy was a solid supporter of women's rights, and you can see in Irene and Soames' relationship -- Soames, who sees his wife as another piece of property, and the determined Irene who only wants her own happiness, but can't afford to live on her own. Their respective kids Jon and Fleur are nice but kind of boring beside their darker, more intense parents.
When examined in the context of the contemporary cultural revolution, the saga assumes another dimension. There is a wonderful paragraph in which Soames and Annette witness the funeral procession of Queen Victoria in 1901 and Galsworthy summarizes the "transmuting influence" of the sixty-four years of her reign, from coaches to motor-cars, the rise of the upper middle class. In the concluding chapter, Soames further contemplates the Forsytian transition at the death of his youngest uncle, which marks the passing of the influential generation of Forsytes that included his own father and old Jolyon. Descended from farmers, a family of merchants, lawyers, realtors, and publishers is coming full circle back to farming and gradually splintering into other families. Eventually, only the name remains.
This is a great novel sprawling a number of generations from the 1800's to the changing times of the 1920's & 30's. Through this novel we can see the changes that took place in society where money was no object. There is love, lust, adultery, death, birth and friendship. We find in this novel that those with money during this early times were not suffering with the problems of monetary poverty but that of emotional poverty. There are standards to uphold and mistakes are made and status can suffer.
For a look at the social shifts that helped define the twentieth century, man has to take a look at the "Forsyte Saga."
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