John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga is perhaps most familiar as the source for two televised British miniseries, but in its own day it had high literary respect and indeed won Galsworthy the Nobel Prize in 1932 for what the Swedish Academy termed his “distinguished art of narration.”

Galsworthy attempted nearly every modern technique, brought a far greater explicitness into English fiction, and represented an Edwardian era that tends to be left out of academic models that jump from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf, Hardy to Joyce. In telling the story of the bourgeois Forsytes and their slow exposure to the greater potentiality of the modern world, the author limns a gallery of characters, from cruel to compassionate, staunch to contemplative. The role of women and their emergence into full citizenship and subjectivity is a major theme of the sequence. In Galsworthy’s love-hate relationship it is the despicable Soames, the “man of property” who is the epitome of malevolent, patriarchal self-centeredness but still the novel’s irresistible center of force and energy. In his wide canvas of London’s denizens, Galsworthy addresses social tensions still visible today.

This seminar will read the first three books, The Man of Property, To Let, and In Chancery. It meets Tuesdays
February 23
March 22
April 26
May 24 
A reading list and copies of the books for discussion are available for registrants.