John Galsworthy - The Forsyte Saga

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS
THE FORSYTE SAGA

JOHN GALSWORTHY (18671933), the son of a lawyer and company director, was born into a privileged background. Educated at Harrow School, New College Oxford, and Lincolns Inn, he was called to the Bar in 1890, but soon abandoned legal practice for writing. His first short stories and novels appeared under the pseudonym John Sinjohn, but his career was firmly established by the double success in 1906 of the novel, The Man of Property, and the production of the play, The Silver Box, which was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales. More theatrical success followed with plays which often took up contemporary social issues, while the maturity of his fiction was confirmed by the publication in 1922 of his brilliant first trilogy, The Forsyte Saga. Among several other novels, he later published two further trilogies, A Modern Comedy in 1929, and End of the Chapter, which was published posthumously. An accomplished chronicler of a distinct phase of English social life, beginning with the high point of Victorianism, he is best known for his detailed portrayal of the lives of the upper-middle class. A prolific writer and a champion of causes, John Galsworthy declined a knighthood, but accepted the Order of Merit in 1929, and the award of the Nobel Prize was announced shortly before his death, although by this time his reputation had begun to suffer from a marked shift in critical taste.

GEOFFREY HARVEY is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading, and the author of The Art of Anthony Trollope, The Romantic Tradition in Modern English Poetry, and D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers: The Critics Debate. He has edited Trollopes Mr Scarboroughs Family, The Bertrams, and Marion Fay and Jeromes Three Men in a Boat/Three Men on the Bummel for the Oxford Worlds Classics series.

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JOHN GALSWORTHY

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
GEOFFREY HARVEY

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Editorial matter Geoffrey Harvey 1995 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1995 Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Galsworthy, John, 18671933. The Forsyte saga/John Galsworthy; edited with an introduction by Geoffrey Harvey.

p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics) Includes bibliographical references.

1. EnglandSocial life and customs19th centuryFiction.

2. EnglandSocial life and customs20th centuryFiction.

3. Middle classEnglandFiction. 4. FamilyEnglandFiction.

5. WomenEnglandFiction. I. Harvey, Geoffrey, 1943

II. Title. III. Series.

PR6013.A5F56 1995 823.912dc20 9425630

ISBN 019-2838628

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd.

Reading, Berkshire

IT is surprising, in view of the continuing appeal of The Forsyte Saga in particular, that John Galsworthys reputation as a novelist is not higher. The years of critical acclaim were those which saw the publication of The Man of Property in 1906, the completion of the trilogy in 1921, and its issue as a single volume in 1922. At first Galsworthy attracted praise as a scourge of outmoded Victorian social codes and moral hypocrisies. However, his writing career coincided with the emergence of Modernism. His achievements in fiction were soon overshadowed by those of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence; and by contrast with their experiments with narrative formwith temporal discontinuities, decentred narratives, myth, and symbolismhis more traditional writing quickly came to seem dated.

The new writers understandably defined their own art by challenging that of their predecessors. The focus of Virginia Woolfs attack on novelists such as Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells, was their constricting materialism, a charge which she makes eloquently but unfairly in her well-known essay, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. but then goes on to denigrate its characters for being rooted in a material social world, and to scorn what he terms their shallow and sentimentalized passions.

Another factor which contributed to the decline of Galsworthys reputation was his adoption of the saga, with its apparent emphasis on character and content rather than form, and on expansion rather than concentration of narrative effects. His fiction was not regarded as being of sufficient seriousness, or difficulty, to merit a great deal of critical attention. In spite of his having been awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize, Galsworthy has been, for the most part, either accorded faint praise as the faithful chronicler of a phase of English social history, or viewed as an example of the last of the pre-Modern writers.

However, he has always enjoyed an enduring reputation with readers. He possesses two essential gifts: story-telling and the creation of character. He also displays the acuteness and tenacity of imagination not only to create an immensely detailed and consistent social world, but to record its inner transmutation over a period of time. Galsworthys art has been undervaluedhis assured control of the complexities of the saga form, his interweaving of the personal and the historical, and his moral imagination. Readers, rather than critics, have understood this. The single-volume edition of