The Forsyte Saga
SynopsisPlot
The three novels which make up The Forsyte Saga chronicle the ebbing social power of the commercial upper-middle-class Forsyte family between 1886 and 1920. Galsworthy's masterly narrative examines not only their fortunes but also the wider developments within society, particularly the changing position of women.
Story
About this book
The Forsyte Saga brings together three novels that follow the Forsyte family, a prosperous upper-middle-class clan whose wealth comes from commerce and property. The story begins in 1886 and runs through to 1920, a period in which the social certainties that once supported families like the Forsytes were shifting beneath them. John Galsworthy sets much of the action in London, where the family's houses, legal offices, and social gatherings form a map of their status and anxieties.
Property, in every sense, sits at the centre of the saga. The Forsytes measure the world in terms of ownership, and Galsworthy traces how that instinct shapes their marriages, their conflicts, and their responses to people who value different things. The changing position of women across these decades is a recurring thread, as characters test or resist the boundaries that family expectation and law place around them.
This critical edition includes detailed notes on the artistic and literary references Galsworthy wove into the text, along with explanations of period slang. These annotations help clarify passages that depend on knowledge of late-Victorian and Edwardian cultural life that later readers may not share.
