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.
This book was
previously uploaded by HarryT (the above text is mainly what HarryT wrote), that's why I start with v4. Since his version was, as he told me, just a direct translation of the PG text, I've created this new one, for this I proofread the text (at what I call
level 2, hundreds of corrections done, checking against a scan from the Internet Archive), added a music score fragment and a family tree, curly quotes, italics, etc.
Any kind of feedback is welcome.
EDIT (v5): Added the hyphen to "to-morrow" et al. where missing.
(previous download count: 55)
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