John Galsworthy (1867-1933) devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating a fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians: the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, loves and losses, fortunes and deaths so real that readers accused him of including as characters in his drama real individuals whom they knew. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.
The entire saga comprises three trilogies of books, of which this is the first. The other two ("A Modern Comedy" and "End of the Chapter") are available as separate downloads.
This first trilogy, "The Forsyte Saga", chronicles the life of three generations of the Forsyte family, a wealthy upper middle class English family, in the turbulent years between the 1880s and the 1920s - a time period during which English society was completely transformed. The books are set against the great events of the day - the Boer War and WWI, the rise of Labour, the death of Queen Victoria, and much more.
This book was originally published as three novels, with a short story "interlude" between each one, the structure being:
The Man of Property
(Interlude) Indian Summer of a Forsyte
In Chancery
(Interlude) Awakening
To Let
This is far from "light reading", but richly rewards the effort. Once you get "into" the story, these are great books.
(The above text was written by HarryT)
The text comes was taken from Project Gutenberg, and it has been proofread, corrected and formatted (I estimate hundreds of corrections done). I've added a family tree and a music fragment score has been redrawn. For those wanting to read this in a web browser, I include an index.zip file: just unzip this and the .epub file in the same directory, and open index.html (and modify index.css if you like).
Any kind of feedbak is welcome.
PS. I've used an SVG-wrapper to rotate the family tree diagram, please tell me if there are issues with any reader.
EDIT (v2): Fixed some minor problems, now the ePUB validates.
EDIT (v3): Fixed a couple of links in the Contents page.
EDIT (v4): Added the hyphen to "to-morrow" et al. where missing.
EDIT (v5): Updated to support the epub2pdf script
(previous download count: 70)
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