Novel
The Forsyte Saga
John Galsworthy · 1906
Opening lines
Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
London, June 1886. The Forsytes, a London family of businessmen, gather at old Jolyon's house for the engagement of his granddaughter June to a young architect without fortune, Philip Bosinney. Soames, a solicitor, has married Irene, who does not love him. To take her away from London and her friends, he has a house built in the country, at Robin Hill, and entrusts its construction to Bosinney. The building site brings Irene into the architect's company.
Context
The three novels appeared between 1906 and 1921, with two interludes published separately in 1918 and 1920; the whole was only brought together in a single volume in 1922. Nothing proves that the author envisaged a sequel in 1906: he returned to the Forsytes only more than ten years later. A television series of twenty-six episodes was broadcast on Saturday evenings in 1967 on a channel that few households could receive; it was its repeat on Sunday evenings, from September 1968, that made it known, with eighteen million people watching the last episode, and it is said that evening services were moved so as not to compete with it. It was the first BBC programme sold to the Soviet Union.
Who it is for
Three novels and two interludes, nearly a thousand pages in the most complete French edition.
Prizes and reception
The Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1932 for his art of narrative, which finds here, according to the Swedish Academy, its highest form.
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