THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL
EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
SAMARKAND STATE INSTITUTE
OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
COURSE WORK
THEME: The Foresyte Saga a social realistic novel.
Done by: Musirmonova Marg’iyona Noryigit qizi
Checked by: Soliyeva Zarina Botirovna
Group: 209 (uzbek)
Samarkand – 2022
1
CONTENT
INTRODUCTION……………………………………..………………………….3
MAIN PART
1. John Galsworthy's personal life and his writing style……………………..…….5
2. Analysis of the Forsyte Saga………………………...…………………………11
3. The main elements in the novel…………………...……………………………35
CONCLUSION………………………………...………………………………...40
THE LIST OF USED LITERATURE…………………………...……………..42
2
INTRODUCTION
The Forsyte Saga, sequence of three novels linked by two interludes by John
Galsworthy. The saga chronicles the lives of three generations of a moneyed
middle-class English family at the turn of the century. As published in 1922, The
Forsyte Saga consisted of the novel The Man of Property, the interlude “Indian
Summer of a Forsyte” , the novel In Chancery, the interlude “Awakening”, and the
novel To Let.
Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and “man of property,” is married to the
beautiful, penniless Irene, who rebels against his values. She falls in love with
Philip Bosinney, the French architect whom Soames had hired to build a country
house. Soames rapes Irene, whom he considers his property, and proceeds to ruin
Bosinney, who subsequently dies in a traffic accident in London. Irene returns to
Soames.
In Chancery concerns the love between Irene and Young Jolyon Forsyte,
Soames’s cousin. (The story of the last days of Old Jolyon, his father, is told in
“Indian Summer of a Forsyte.”) Irene and Soames divorce; she marries Jolyon and
bears a son, Jon. Soames and his second wife, Annette Lamotte, have a daughter,
Fleur.
The aim of the paper intend is to know position which was The Forsyte
Saga a social realistic novel to highlight ploys of manipulation.
The actuality of the theme. The present work shows the analysis of
the thesis in movement all represent different people, groups, or concepts that had
an active part during the period.
The tasks of the work. We put following tasks forward:
-To reveal the context of production reflected at The Forsyte Saga a social realistic
novel.
-To describe the effects of management of the period in The Forsyte Saga a social
realistic novel.
-To give the opportunity to develop some creative writing.
3
The theoretical value of the work is to allow the opportunity to search,
find, and use various sources in writing. Ideally, these sources will liven and
strengthen the composition..
The practical value of the work. The information brought into forth in the
work are very useful for students who study in English language and literature
departments. Moreover, the analyses given in the work are practical for students
and learners’ improvement of English.
The structure of the work. Hereby work consists of introduction, a main
part with 3 parts, conclusion and the list of the used literature
4
1. John Galsworthy's personal life and his writing style.
John Galsworthy was one of the last representatives of Critical Realism in
English literature. He was a novelist, dramatist, short story writer and essayist
taken together. His works give the most complete and critical picture of English
bourgeois society at the beginning of the 20th century.
The author deals with contemporary social problems. He is critical of
injustice, tyranny and all the evils of life, but his criticism is not destructive: he
himself was too much a member of the privileged classes to wish to rebuild the
world he lived in. His characters are mostly of the upper middle class and the
aristocracy with which he was wholly familiar Galsworthy tried to revive the
realistic traditions of his predecessors -"the brilliant school of English novelists".
His mastery as a writer lies in his keen criticism of national prejudices, his
exciting pints and a realistic observation of life and characters.
The writer was born at Coombe, Surrey, on August 14, 1867. He came from
a well-to-do bourgeois family. His father was a rich lawyer, and he wanted his son
to follow the career John studied law at Oxford, but he was more interested in
literature than in law. Probably due to this fact he gave up his practice a year after
graduation and went travelling all over the world.
In 1891 Galsworthy came to the Crimea. His stay in Russia, short as it was,
produced a deep impression upon the future writer and awakened his interest in the
country, its people and literature.
Though the profession of a lawyer was considered to be more honourable
and more profitable than that of a writer, Galsworthy gave up law for literature.
His cherished desire was to expose all the evils of society and to reveal the truth of
life, and he hoped that the profession of a writer would help him to realize his
lifelong dream.
Galsworthy enjoyed popularity in his lifetime. Much of his energy was
devoted to the Pen-club, an association of writers of which he was president until
his death in 1933.
5
Galsworthy was no longer young when he started writing. His first notable
work was "The Island Pharisees" (1904) in which he attacked the stagnation of
thought in the English privileged classes, with their avoidance of any emotion, and
their preference for a dull settled way of living. The five works that followed
( "The Country House" (1907), "Fraternity" (1909),"The Patrician (1911), "The
Dark Flower"(1913) and "The Freelands"(1915) reveal a similar philosophy. The
author criticizes country squires, the aristocracy and artists, and shows his deep
sympathy for strong passions, sincerity, true love Galsworthy's masterpiece is,
however, the trilogy entitled "The Forsyte Saga". It consists of three novels and
two interludes, as the author calls them:
"The Man of Property" (1906)
"In Chancery"(1920)
"To Let"(1921)
"Awakening "(interlude)
"Indian Summer of a Forsyte" (interlude)
"The Forsyte Saga" is followed by "A Modern Comedy", also a trilogy, consisting
of
three novels and two interludes:
"The White Monkey" (1924)
"The Silver Spoon"(1926)
"The Swan Song" (1928)
"A Silent Wooing" (interlude)
"Passers-By"( interlude).
The trilogy called "End of the Chapter" was written at a later period. It consists of
the
following novels:
"Maid in Waiting"
"Flowering Wilderness"
"Over the River".
6
In the first trilogy, which was written in the most mature period of his
literary activity, Galsworthy mercilessly attacks the commercial world of the
Forsytes, and in particular, the main character, Soames Forsyte, "the man of
property".
In his later works, "A Modern Comedy" and The End of the Chapter",
written after World War I Galsworthy's criticism becomes less sharp. The old
generation of the Forsytes does not seem so bad to the author as compared to the
new one. During his progress through six novels and four interludes Soames
becomes almost a positive character, in spite of the author's critical attitude
towards him at the beginning of the Saga.
Galsworthy is also known as a playwright. His plays deal with burning
problems of contemporary life. The author describes the hard life of workers
("Strife"), attacks cruel regime in English prisons ("Justice"), expresses his
indignation towards wars ("The Mob"), rejects the colonial policy of British
imperialism ("The Forest"), and presents some other aspects of capitalist evils and
injustice. Galsworthy's plays were very popular, but it is thanks to "The Forsyte
Saga" he became one of the greatest figures in the world literature.
"The Forsyte Saga"
"The Forsyte Saga" is a history of three generations of the the Forsyte family
from the eighties of the 19th century up to the twenties of the 20th century. "The
Man of Property" shows two successive generations of a rich upper middle class
family at the end of the 19th century. It is a social novel: the author shows the
Forsyte family as a small unit of English upper middle class society of his own
time. The Forsytes possess all the features typical of their class as a whole, and
they have to obey the laws which govern it. He who dares to disobey these laws is
ostracized by society.
Characteristic features of the Forsytes are: extreme individualism, egoism,
an ability never to give themselves away, contempt for everything foreign, a strong
sense of property, money worship, tenacity, snobbery, practicality.
7
The collision between the sense of property and money worship on the one
hand, and true love and a keen sense of beauty on the other hand, motivates the
plot of the novel Soames Forsyte- the man of property- is the main character of the
novel. He is an embodiment of the spirit of society where the cult of property rules
the world. He is sure that everything in the world can be bought with money. He
regards not only his pictures, houses and investments as his property but even his
wife.
Soames is unable to comprehend that all his property, large as it is, cannot
make Irene love him. The other members of the family are unable to understand it
either. In their opinion the very fact that Irene has no fortune of her own is enough
to make it her duty to love and obey her rich husband. That is the Forsytes'
conception of love and marriage.
Only when Irene left him and he realized that she was penniless, that she had
taken nothing that he or his people had given her, he came to understand how
deeply she hated him In Galsworthy's opinion property is "an empty shell".
Soames' fate confirms this idea: rich as he was, he was not happy.
The Forsyte Saga, sequence of three novels linked by two interludes by John
Galsworthy. The saga chronicles the lives of three generations of a moneyed
middle-class English family at the turn of the century. As published in 1922, The
Forsyte Saga consisted of the novel The Man of Property (1906), the interlude (a
short story) “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” (1918), the novel In Chancery (1920),
the interlude “Awakening” (1920), and the novel To Let (1921).
Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and “man of property,” is married to the
beautiful, penniless Irene, who rebels against his values. She falls in love with
Philip Bosinney, the French architect whom Soames had hired to build a country
house. Soames rapes Irene, whom he considers his property, and proceeds to ruin
Bosinney, who subsequently dies in a traffic accident in London. Irene returns to
Soames.
8
In Chancery concerns the love between Irene and Young Jolyon Forsyte,
Soames’s cousin. (The story of the last days of Old Jolyon, his father, is told in
“Indian Summer of a Forsyte.”) Irene and Soames divorce; she marries Jolyon and
bears a son, Jon. Soames and his second wife, Annette Lamotte, have a daughter,
Fleur.
In To Let, Fleur and Jon grow up and fall in love; Jolyon informs his son of
Irene and Soames’s past relationship. Although Fleur is determined to marry Jon,
he refuses. Fleur becomes the wife of Michael Mont, son of a baronet. Jolyon dies,
and Irene leaves England. Soames discovers that Annette is involved in an affair
with a Frenchman, as Irene had been.
John Galsworthy, (born Aug. 14, 1867, Kingston Hill, Surrey, Eng.—died
Jan. 31, 1933, Grove Lodge, Hampstead), English novelist and playwright, winner
of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.
Galsworthy’s family, of Devonshire farming stock traceable to the 16th
century, had made a comfortable fortune in property in the 19th century. His father
was a solicitor. Educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, Galsworthy was
called to the bar in 1890. With a view to specializing in marine law, he took a
voyage around the world, during which he encountered Joseph Conrad, then mate
of a merchant ship. They became lifelong friends. Galsworthy found law
uncongenial and took to writing. For his first works, From the Four Winds (1897),
a collection of short stories, and the novel Jocelyn (1898), both published at his
own expense, he used the pseudonym John Sinjohn. The Island Pharisees (1904)
was the first book to appear under his own name.
9
2. Analysis of the Forsyte Saga
The Man of Property (1906) began the novel sequence known as The
Forsyte Saga, by which Galsworthy is chiefly remembered; others in the same
series are “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” (1918, in Five Tales), In Chancery (1920),
Awakening (1920), and To Let (1921). The saga chronicles the lives of three
generations of a large, upper middle-class family at the turn of the century. Having
recently risen to wealth and success in the profession and business world, the
Forsytes are tenaciously clannish and anxious to increase their wealth. The novels
imply that their desire for property is morally wrong. The saga intersperses
diatribes against wealth with lively passages describing character and background.
In The Man of Property, Galsworthy attacks the Forsytes through the character of
Soames Forsyte, a solicitor who considers his wife Irene as a mere form of
property. Irene finds her husband physically unattractive and falls in love with a
young architect who dies. The other two novels of the saga, In Chancery and To
Let, trace the subsequent divorce of Soames and Irene, the second marriages they
make, and the eventual romantic entanglements of their children. The story of the
Forsyte family after World War I was continued in The White Monkey (1924), The
Silver Spoon (1926), and Swan Song (1928), collected in A Modern Comedy
(1929). Galsworthy’s other novels include The Country House (1907), The
Patrician (1911), and The Freelands (1915).
Galsworthy was also a successful dramatist, his plays, written in a
naturalistic style, usually examining some controversial ethical or social problem.
They include The Silver Box (1906), which, like many of his other works, has a
legal theme and depicts a bitter contrast of the law’s treatment of the rich and the
poor; Strife (1909), a study of industrial relations; Justice (1910), a realistic
portrayal of prison life that roused so much feeling that it led to reform; and
Loyalties (1922), the best of his later plays. He also wrote verse.
In 1905 Galsworthy married Ada Pearson, the divorced wife of his first
cousin, A.J. Galsworthy. Galsworthy had, in secret, been closely associated with
10
his future wife for about ten years before their marriage. Irene in The Forsyte Saga
is to some extent a portrait of Ada Galsworthy, although her first husband was
wholly unlike Soames Forsyte.
Galsworthy’s novels, by their abstention from complicated psychology and
their greatly simplified social viewpoint, became accepted as faithful patterns of
English life for a time. Galsworthy is remembered for this evocation of Victorian
and Edwardian upper middle-class life and for his creation of Soames Forsyte, a
dislikable character who nevertheless compels the reader’s sympathy.
A television serial of The Forsyte Saga by the British Broadcasting
Corporation achieved immense popularity in Great Britain in 1967 and later in
many other nations, especially the United States, reviving interest in an author
whose reputation had plummeted after his death.
English literature, the body of written works produced in the English
language by inhabitants of the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century
to the present day. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles
are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, Canadian
literature, and New Zealand literature.
English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be
argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated
Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign
in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed
themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic
instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by
William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical
learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts;
and ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the
19th century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, Classical antiquity
11
continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses derived from a foreign
source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century
and the Modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals
and movements for inspiration. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism
dead in the late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as
structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin, infused
the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and
university departments. Additional influence was exercised by deconstructionist
analysis, based largely on the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Further, Britain’s past imperial activities around the globe continued to
inspire literature—in some cases wistful, in other cases hostile. Finally, English
literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not only in predominantly
English-speaking countries but also in all those others where English is the first
choice of study as a second language.
In 1905 Galsworthy married Ada Pearson, the divorced wife of his first
cousin, A.J. Galsworthy. Galsworthy had, in secret, been closely associated with
his future wife for about ten years before their marriage. Irene in The Forsyte Saga
is to some extent a portrait of Ada Galsworthy, although her first husband was
wholly unlike Soames Forsyte.
Galsworthy’s novels, by their abstention from complicated psychology and
their greatly simplified social viewpoint, became accepted as faithful patterns of
English life for a time. Galsworthy is remembered for this evocation of Victorian
and Edwardian upper middle-class life and for his creation of Soames Forsyte, a
dislikable character who nevertheless compels the reader’s sympathy.
A television serial of The Forsyte Saga by the British Broadcasting
Corporation achieved immense popularity in Great Britain in 1967 and later in
many other nations, especially the United States, reviving interest in an author
whose reputation had plummeted after his death.
12
English literature, the body of written works produced in the English
language by inhabitants of the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century
to the present day. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles
are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, Canadian
literature, and New Zealand literature.
English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be
argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated
Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign
in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed
themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic
instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by
William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical
learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts;
and ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the
19th century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, Classical antiquity
continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses derived from a foreign
source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century
and the Modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals
and movements for inspiration. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism
dead in the late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as
structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin, infused
the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and
university departments. Additional influence was exercised by deconstructionist
analysis, based largely on the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Further, Britain’s past imperial activities around the globe continued to
inspire literature—in some cases wistful, in other cases hostile. Finally, English
literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not only in predominantly
13
English-speaking countries but also in all those others where English is the first
choice of study as a second language.
English literature is therefore not so much insular as detached from the
continental European tradition across the Channel. It is strong in all the
conventional categories of the bookseller’s list: in Shakespeare it has a dramatist of
world renown; in poetry, a genre notoriously resistant to adequate translation and
therefore difficult to compare with the poetry of other literatures, it is so peculiarly
rich as to merit inclusion in the front rank; English literature’s humour has been
found as hard to convey to foreigners as poetry, if not more so—a fact at any rate
permitting bestowal of the label “idiosyncratic”; English literature’s remarkable
body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of insularity;
in autobiography, biography, and historical writing, English literature compares
with the best of any culture; and children’s literature, fantasy, essays, and journals,
which tend to be considered minor genres, are all fields of exceptional achievement
as regards English literature. Even in philosophical writings, popularly thought of
as hard to combine with literary value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John
Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for
lucidity and grace with the best of the French philosophers and the masters of
Classical antiquity.
Some of English literature’s most distinguished practitioners in the 20th
century—from Joseph Conrad at its beginning to V.S. Naipaul and Tom Stoppard
at its end—were born outside the British Isles. What is more, none of the
aforementioned had as much in common with his adoptive country as did, for
instance, Doris Lessing and Peter Porter (two other distinguished writerimmigrants to Britain), both having been born into a British family and having
been brought up on British Commonwealth soil.
On the other hand, during the same period in the 20th century, many notable
practitioners of English literature left the British Isles to live abroad: James Joyce,
D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Graves, Graham
14
Greene, Muriel Spark, and Anthony Burgess. In one case, that of Samuel Beckett,
this process was carried to the extent of writing works first in French and then
translating them into English.
Even English literature considered purely as a product of the British Isles is
extraordinarily heterogeneous, however. Literature actually written in those Celtic
tongues once prevalent in Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—called the
“Celtic Fringe”—is treated separately (see Celtic literature). Yet Irish, Scots, and
Welsh writers have contributed enormously to English literature even when they
have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet Robert Burns and the 20th-century
Scots writer Alasdair Gray have done. In the latter half of the 20th century, interest
began also to focus on writings in English or English dialect by recent settlers in
Britain, such as Afro-Caribbeans and people from Africa proper, the Indian
subcontinent, and East Asia.
Even within England, culturally and historically the dominant partner in the
union of territories comprising Britain, literature has been as enriched by strongly
provincial writers as by metropolitan ones. Another contrast more fruitful than not
for English letters has been that between social milieus, however much observers
of Britain in their own writings may have deplored the survival of class
distinctions. As far back as medieval times, a courtly tradition in literature crossfertilized with an earthier demotic one. Shakespeare’s frequent juxtaposition of
royalty in one scene with plebeians in the next reflects a very British way of
looking at society. This awareness of differences between high life and low, a state
of affairs fertile in creative tensions, is observable throughout the history of
English literature.
The Norman Conquest worked no immediate transformation on either the
language or the literature of the English. Older poetry continued to be copied
during the last half of the 11th century; two poems of the early 12th century—
“Durham,” which praises that city’s cathedral and its relics, and “Instructions for
Christians,” a didactic piece—show that correct alliterative verse could be
15
composed well after 1066. But even before the conquest, rhyme had begun to
supplant rather than supplement alliteration in some poems, which continued to use
the older four-stress line, although their rhythms varied from the set types used in
classical Old English verse. A postconquest example is “The Grave,” which
contains several rhyming lines; a poem from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the
death of William the Conqueror, lamenting his cruelty and greed, has more rhyme
than alliteration.
By the end of the 12th century, English poetry had been so heavily
influenced by French models that such a work as the long epic Brut (c. 1200) by
Lawamon, a Worcestershire priest, seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with
rhyming couplets while generally eschewing French vocabulary. The Brut draws
mainly upon Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut (1155; based in turn upon
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of
Britain]), but in Lawamon’s hands the Arthurian story takes on a Germanic and
heroic flavour largely missing in Wace. The Brut exists in two manuscripts, one
written shortly after 1200 and the other some 50 years later. That the later version
has been extensively modernized and somewhat abridged suggests the speed with
which English language and literary tastes were changing in this period. The
Proverbs of Alfred was written somewhat earlier, in the late 12th century; these
proverbs deliver conventional wisdom in a mixture of rhymed couplets and
alliterative lines, and it is hardly likely that any of the material they contain
actually originated with the king whose wisdom they celebrate. The early 13thcentury Bestiary mixes alliterative lines, three- and four-stress couplets, and
septenary (heptameter) lines, but the logic behind this mix is more obvious than in
the Brut and the Proverbs, for the poet was imitating the varied metres of his Latin
source. More regular in form than these poems is the anonymous Poema morale in
septenary couplets, in which an old man delivers a dose of moral advice to his
presumably younger audience.
16
By far the most brilliant poem of this period is The Owl and the Nightingale
(written after 1189), an example of the popular debate genre. The two birds argue
topics ranging from their hygienic habits, looks, and songs to marriage,
prognostication, and the proper modes of worship. The nightingale stands for the
joyous aspects of life, the owl for the sombre; there is no clear winner, but the
debate ends as the birds go off to state their cases to one Nicholas of Guildford, a
wise man. The poem is learned in the clerical tradition but wears its learning
lightly as the disputants speak in colloquial and sometimes earthy language. Like
the Poema morale, The Owl and the Nightingale is metrically regular (octosyllabic
couplets), but it uses the French metre with an assurance unusual in so early a
poem.
The 13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long didactic poems
presenting biblical narrative, saints’ lives, or moral instruction for those untutored
in Latin or French. The most idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum by Orm, an
Augustinian canon in the north of England. Written in some 20,000 lines arranged
in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets, the work is interesting mainly in that the
manuscript that preserves it is Orm’s autograph and shows his somewhat fussy
efforts to reform and regularize English spelling. Other biblical paraphrases are
Genesis and Exodus, Jacob and Joseph, and the vast Cursor mundi, whose subject,
as its title suggests, is the history of the world. An especially popular work was the
South English Legendary, which began as a miscellaneous collection of saints’
lives but was expanded by later redactors and rearranged in the order of the church
calendar. The didactic tradition continued into the 14th century with Robert
Mannyng’s Handling Sin, a confessional manual whose expected dryness is
relieved by the insertion of lively narratives, and the Prick of Conscience, a
popular summary of theology sometimes attributed to the mystic Richard Rolle.
The earliest examples of verse romance, a genre that would remain popular
through the Middle Ages, appeared in the 13th century. King Horn and Floris and
Blauncheflour both are preserved in a manuscript of about 1250. King Horn, oddly
17
written in short two- and three-stress lines, is a vigorous tale of a kingdom lost and
regained, with a subplot concerning Horn’s love for Princess Rymenhild. Floris
and Blauncheflour is more exotic, being the tale of a pair of royal lovers who
become separated and, after various adventures in eastern lands, reunited. Not
much later than these is The Lay of Havelok the Dane, a tale of princely love and
adventure similar to King Horn but more competently executed. Many more such
romances were produced in the 14th century. Popular subgenres were “the matter
of Britain” (Arthurian romances such as Of Arthour and of Merlin and Ywain and
Gawain), “the matter of Troy” (tales of antiquity such as The Siege of Troy and
King Alisaunder), and the English Breton lays (stories of otherworldly magic, such
as Lai le Freine and Sir Orfeo, modeled after those of professional Breton
storytellers). These relatively unsophisticated works were written for a bourgeois
audience, and the manuscripts that preserve them are early examples of
commercial book production. The humorous beast epic makes its first appearance
in Britain in the 13th century with The Fox and the Wolf, taken indirectly from the
Old French Roman de Renart. In the same manuscript with this work is Dame
Sirith, the earliest English fabliau. Another sort of humour is found in The Land of
Cockaygne, which depicts a utopia better than heaven, where rivers run with milk,
honey, and wine, geese fly about already roasted, and monks hunt with hawks and
dance with nuns.
The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods
One of the most important factors in the nature and development of English
literature between about 1350 and 1550 was the peculiar linguistic situation in
England at the beginning of the period. Among the small minority of the
population that could be regarded as literate, bilingualism and even trilingualism
were common. Insofar as it was considered a serious literary medium at all,
English was obliged to compete on uneven terms with Latin and with the AngloNorman dialect of French widely used in England at the time. Moreover, extreme
dialectal diversity within English itself made it difficult for vernacular writings,
18
irrespective of their literary pretensions, to circulate very far outside their
immediate areas of composition, a disadvantage not suffered by writings in AngloNorman and Latin. Literary culture managed to survive and in fact to flourish in
the face of such potentially crushing factors as the catastrophic mortality of the
Black Death (1347–51), chronic external and internal military conflicts in the form
of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, and serious social, political,
and religious unrest, as evinced in the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) and the rise of
Lollardism (centred on the religious teachings of John Wycliffe). All the more
remarkable, then, was the literary and linguistic revolution that took place in
England between about 1350 and 1400 and that was slowly and soberly
consolidated over the subsequent 150 years.
The Man of Property. It is 1886, and all the Forsytes are gathered at Old
Jolyon Forsyte’s house to celebrate the engagement of his granddaughter, June, to
Philip Bosinney, a young architect. Young Jolyon Forsyte, June’s father, is
estranged from his family because he ran away with a governess, whom he later
married after June’s mother’s death. Because of the ensuing scandal, June has
grown up in the home of her grandfather.
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Old Jolyon complains that since June became engaged he has seen little of
her. Because he is lonely, he calls on Young Jolyon, whom he has not seen in
many years. He finds his son painting watercolors and also working as an
underwriter for Lloyd’s. Young Jolyon has two children, Holly and Jolly, by his
second wife, and Old Jolyon comes to dote upon them. Old Jolyon, who has the
tenderest heart among the six Forsyte brothers (there are ten siblings in all) realizes
that he wishes for a complete reconciliation with his son.
The family knows that Soames, son of Old Jolyon’s brother James, has been
having trouble with his lovely wife, Irene. She has developed a profound aversion
for her husband and has recently reminded him of her premarital stipulation that
19
she should have her freedom if the marriage were not a success. Desperate to
please her, Soames plans to build a large country place at Robin Hill and hires
June’s fiancé to design and build the house.
When Soames suggests alterations to the plans, Bosinney appears offended,
and in the end, the plans remain as they were drawn. As work on the house
proceeds, the two men argue over the costs, which are exceeding the original
estimate. One day, Soames’s uncle, Swithin Forsyte, takes Irene to see the house,
where she meets Bosinney. While Swithin dozes, the architect and Irene talk and
fall deeply in love with each other. From this point on, Irene’s already unbearable
life with Soames becomes impossible. She asks for a separate room.
Problems over the house continue. Bosinney has agreed to decorate it but
only if he can have a free hand, to which Soames finally agrees. Irene and
Bosinney begin to meet secretly. As their affair progresses, June becomes more
unhappy, and as her suspicions grow, her deep friendship with Irene is strained.
Finally, Old Jolyon takes June away for a holiday. He writes to Young Jolyon,
asking him to see Bosinney and learn his intentions toward June. Young Jolyon
talks to Bosinney, but the report he makes to his father is vague.
When the house is completed, Soames sues Bosinney for exceeding his
highest estimate. Irene refuses to move to Robin Hill. When the lawsuit over the
house comes to trial, Soames wins his case without difficulty. This same night,
Bosinney, after spending the afternoon with Irene and learning that Soames has
forced himself on her, is accidentally run over and killed. There is a lingering
suspicion that his death may have been a suicide. Irene leaves her husband on the
day of the trial, but that night she returns to his house because there is nowhere
else for her to go.
“Indian Summer of a Forsyte.” June persuades her grandfather to buy Robin
Hill for Jolyon’s family. A short time after Bosinney’s death, Irene leaves Soames
permanently; she settles in a small flat and starts giving music lessons to support
herself. Several years later, Irene visits Robin Hill secretly and meets Old Jolyon.
20
She wins him over with her gentleness and charm, and during that summer, she
makes his days happy. Each of her visits is a joy to the old man. Late in the
summer, he dies quietly while waiting for her to come to him again.
In Chancery . After his separation from Irene, Soames devotes himself to
making money. Then, still hoping to have an heir, he begins to court a young
French woman, Annette Lamotte. His sister, Winifred Dartie, is facing.
The Forsyte Saga, first published under that title in 1922, is a series of three
novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by the English author
John Galsworthy, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. They chronicle the
vicissitudes of the leading members of a large upper-middle-class English family
that is similar to Galsworthy's.Only a few generations removed from their farmer
ancestors, its members are keenly aware of their status as "new money". The main
character, the solicitor and connoisseur Soames Forsyte, sees himself as a "man of
property" by virtue of his ability to accumulate material possessions, but that does
not succeed in bringing him pleasure.
Separate sections of the saga, as well as the lengthy story in its entirety, have
been adapted for cinema and television. The Man of Property, the first book, was
adapted in 1949 by Hollywood as That Forsyte Woman, starring Errol Flynn,
Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young. In 1967, the BBC produced a
popular 26-part serial that dramatised The Forsyte Saga and a subsequent trilogy
concerning the Forsytes, A Modern Comedy. In 2002 Granada Television
produced two series for the ITV network: The Forsyte Saga and The Forsyte Saga:
To Let. Both made runs in the U.S. as parts of Masterpiece Theatre. In 2003, The
Forsyte Saga was listed as #123 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "bestloved novel".
Following The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy wrote two more trilogies and
several more interludes based around the titular family. The resulting series is
collectively titled The Forsyte Chronicles.
21
In this first novel of the Forsyte Saga, after introducing us to the impressive
array of Forsytes headed by the formidable Aunt Ann, Galsworthy moves into the
main action of the saga by detailing Soames Forsyte's desire to own things,
including his beautiful wife, Irene Forsyte (née Heron). He is jealous of her
friendships and wants her to be his alone. He concocts a plan to move her to a
house he is having built at Robin Hill, away from everyone she knows and cares
for. She resists his grasping intentions, and falls in love with the architect Philip
Bosinney, who has been engaged by Soames to build the house. Bosinney returns
her love, although he is the fiancé of her young friend June Forsyte, the daughter of
Soames's estranged cousin "Young" Jolyon. There is no happy ending: Irene leaves
Soames after he asserts what he perceives to be his ultimate right on his property
by raping her, and Bosinney dies under the wheels of a bus after being driven
frantic by the news of the rape.
In a short interlude after The Man of Property Galsworthy delves into the
newfound friendship between Irene and Old Jolyon Forsyte (June's grandfather,
now the owner of the house Soames had built). This attachment gives Old Jolyon
pleasure, but exhausts his strength. He leaves Irene money in his will, with Young
Jolyon, his son, as trustee. In the end Old Jolyon dies under an ancient oak tree in
the garden of the Robin Hill house.
The marital discord of both Soames and his sister Winifred is the subject of
the second novel (the title refers to the Court of Chancery, which dealt with
domestic issues). They take steps to divorce their spouses, Irene and Montague
Dartie respectively. However, while Soames tells his sister to brave the
consequences of going to court, he is unwilling to go through a divorce. Instead he
stalks and hounds Irene, follows her abroad, and asks her to have his child, which
was his father's wish.
Irene inherits £15,000 after Old Jolyon's death. His son, Young Jolyon
Forsyte, also Soames's cousin, manages Irene's finances. When she first leaves
Soames, Young Jolyon offers his support. By the time his son Jolly dies in the
22
South African War, Irene has developed a strong friendship with Jolyon. Then
Soames confronts young Jolyon and Irene at Robin Hill, falsely accusing them of
having an affair. Young Jolyon and Irene assert that they have had an affair
because Soames has it in his mind already. This statement gives Soames the
evidence he needs for divorce proceedings. That confrontation sparks an eventual
consummation between young Jolyon and Irene, leading to their marriage once the
divorce is final and the birth of a son Jolyon "Jon" Forsyte. Soames marries
Annette, the young daughter of a French Soho restaurant owner. With his new
wife, he has his only child, a daughter named Fleur Forsyte.
The subject of the second interlude is the naive and exuberant lifestyle of
eight-year-old Jon Forsyte. He loves and is loved by his parents. He has an idyllic
youth, and his every desire indulged.
This novel concludes the Forsyte Saga. Second cousins Fleur and Jon
Forsyte meet and fall in love, ignorant of their parents' past troubles, indiscretions
and misdeeds. Once Soames, Jolyon, and Irene discover their romance, they forbid
their children to see each other again. Irene and Jolyon also fear that Fleur is too
much like her father, and once she has Jon in her grasp, will want to possess him
entirely. Despite her feelings for Jon, Fleur has a very suitable suitor, Michael
Mont, heir to a baronetcy, who has fallen in love with her. If they marry, Fleur
would elevate the status of her family from nouveau riche to the aristocratic upper
class. The title derives from Soames' reflections as he breaks up the house in which
his Uncle Timothy, recently deceased in 1920 at age 101 and the last of the older
generation of Forsytes, had lived a recluse, hoarding his life like property.
Knowing he is soon to die from a weak heart, Jolyon writes a letter to Jon,
detailing the events of Irene's marriage to Soames, including her love affair with
Philip Bosinney and Soames's rape of her and warns him that Irene would be alone
if he were to marry Fleur. But while Jon reads the letter, Jolyon suddenly dies of a
heart attack, and Jon is left torn between the past and his present love for Fleur. He
ultimately rejects Fleur, breaking his own heart as well as hers, and leaves for
23
Canada. Fleur marries Michael Mont, though she knows she doesn't love him.
With her marriage, Soames is separated from the only person whom he has truly
loved. Irene also leaves for Canada, selling the house at Robin Hill. Soames and
Irene briefly exchange glances at a distance and a kind of peace is made between
them, but Soames is left contemplating all that he never really had but tried to
possess.
A 1949 adaptation, called That Forsyte Woman in its United States release,
starred Errol Flynn as Soames, Greer Garson as Irene, Walter Pidgeon as Young
Jolyon, and Robert Young as Philip Bosinney.
A television adaptation by the BBC of The Forsyte Saga, and its sequel
trilogy A Modern Comedy, starred Eric Porter as Soames, Joseph O'Conor as Old
Jolyon, Susan Hampshire as Fleur, Kenneth More as Young Jolyon and Nyree
Dawn Porter as Irene. It was adapted for television and produced by Donald
Wilson and was shown in 26 episodes on Saturday evenings between 7 January
and 1 July 1967 on BBC2. It was the repeat on Sunday evenings on BBC1 starting
on 8 September 1968 that secured the programme's success, with 18 million tuning
in for the final episode in 1969. It was shown in the United States on public
television and broadcast all over the world, and became the first British television
programme to be sold to the Soviet Union.
There have been various BBC radio dramatisations. The first was probably a
radio production of The Man of Property in 11 weekly parts commencing 9
December 1945 on the BBC Home Service. The music used as the opening and
closing theme came from Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations, specifically the
Nimrod variation. This adaptation starred Leo Genn as Jo, Grizelda Hervey as
Irene and Ronald Simpson as Soames. It was adapted by Muriel Levy and
produced by Val Gielgud and Felix Felton. Young Jolyons in later adaptations
included Andrew Cruickshank, Leo Genn and Guy Rolfe. Another production of
the dramatised cycle, which had Rachel Gurney as Irene, Noel Johnson as Young
Jolyon and Alan Wheatley as Soames, came soon after the 1967 TV series. The
24
version broadcast in 1990 comprised a 75-minute opening episode followed by 22
hour-long episodes, entitled The Forsyte Chronicles. It was the most expensive
radio drama serial ever broadcast, due to its length and its big-name cast, which
included Dirk Bogarde, Diana Quick, Michael Williams and Alan Howard. This
radio series was rerun on BBC 7 radio in 2004, and has been released
commercially.
In January 2016, BBC Radio 4 began broadcasting a new radio adaptation
by Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan under the title The Forsytes, scheduled to
continue until late 2017. The cast was led by Joseph Millson as Soames, Jessica
Raine as Fleur, Juliet Aubrey as Irene, Harry Haddon Paton as Bosinney and Ewan
Bailey as Young Jolyon. It was directed by Marion Nancarrow and Gemma
Jenkins.
In 2002, the first two books and the first interlude were adapted by Granada
Television for the ITV network, although, like the 1967 production, the miniseries
took many liberties with Galsworthy's original work. Additional funding for this
production was provided by American PBS station WGBH, the BBC version
having been a success on PBS in the early 1970s.
Immediately following the success of the 2002 adaptation, a second series
was released in 2003. It portrays the saga's last book To Let. Much of the cast
resumed their roles, but most of the first generation of Forsytes had died in the
previous series. The principal characters played by Damian Lewis, Gina McKee,
Rupert Graves, and Amanda Root return. It has also been released on DVD.
Duty versus Desire: Young Jolyon was the favourite of the family until he
left his wife for his daughter's governess. He eschews his status in society and in
the Forsyte clan to follow his heart. Soames, though it seems he is the polar
opposite of Jolyon, has those same inclinations toward doing what he desires. For
example, instead of finding a wife who is rich, he marries Irene and then Annette,
who have neither money nor status. When he takes Irene to a play about a married
25
woman and her lover, he ironically sympathizes with the lover and not the
husband. However, most of his decisions are on the side of duty.
Generations and Change: The many generations of the Forsyte clan remind
everyone of what has come to pass over the years. However, as the old ranks begin
to die, people are able to change. For example, after a few generations, the fact that
they are nouveau riche does not matter as much. This is also the case with Soames
and Irene's marital problems. Once they grow old and their children can overcome
their parents' past, Soames can finally let go of the past. Another change with
generations is the diminished number of Forsyte offspring. Many of the second
generation have fewer children.
Galsworthy's sequel to The Forsyte Saga came in A Modern Comedy,
written in the years 1924 to 1928. This comprises the novel The White Monkey; an
interlude, A Silent Wooing; a second novel, The Silver Spoon; a second interlude,
Passers By; and a third novel, Swan Song. The principal characters are Soames and
Fleur, and the second saga ends with the death of Soames in 1926. This is also the
point reached at the end of the 1967 television series.
Galsworthy wrote one further trilogy, End of the Chapter, comprising Maid
in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, and Over the River (also known as One More
River), chiefly dealing with Michael Mont's young cousin, Dinny Cherrell.
The three trilogies have been republished under the collective title of The
Forsyte Chronicles.
In 1930 Galsworthy published On Forsyte 'Change, which deals in the main
with the older Forsytes before the events chronicled in The Man of Property.
Galsworthy states in a foreword that "They have all been written since Swan Song
was finished but in place they come between the Saga and the Comedy ..." By way
of explanation he writes that "It is hard to part suddenly and finally from those
with whom one has lived so long; and these footnotes do really, I think, help to fill
in and round out the chronicles of the Forsyte family."
26
In 1994 Suleika Dawson published a sequel to The Forsytes titled The
Forsytes: The Saga Continues in which Soames's daughter, Fleur, Lady Mont, is
the main character. She has been a dutiful wife and mother, and has long forgotten
her love for Jon Forsyte, but when tragedy brings Jon back to England Fleur is
determined to recapture the past and the love of her life.
Despite the opinions even of some who knew Conrad personally, such as
fellow-novelist Henry James, Conrad—even when only writing elegantly crafted
letters to his uncle and acquaintances—was always at heart a writer who sailed,
rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailing experiences as a backdrop for
many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the
nautical motifs. The failure of many critics to appreciate this caused him much
frustration.
He wrote oftener about life at sea and in exotic parts than about life on
British land because—unlike, for example, his friend John Galsworthy, author of
The Forsyte Saga—he knew little about everyday domestic relations in Britain.
When Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea was published in 1906 to critical acclaim, he
wrote to his French translator: "The critics have been vigorously swinging the
censer to me.... Behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper:
'Keep to the open sea! Don't land!' They want to banish me to the middle of the
ocean." Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that "the public
mind fastens on externals" such as his "sea life", oblivious to how authors
transform their material "from particular to general, and appeal to universal
emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience".
Nevertheless, Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the
United States. H.L. Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American
readers to recognise how Conrad conjured up "the general out of the particular". F.
Scott Fitzgerald, writing to Mencken, complained about having been omitted from
a list of Conrad imitators. Since Fitzgerald, dozens of other American writers have
27
acknowledged their debts to Conrad, including William Faulkner, William
Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon.[122]
An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time—Cyril
Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain—quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I
have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the
reader's attention."
Conrad the artist famously aspired, in the words of his preface to The Nigger
of the 'Narcissus' (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to
make you feel... before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is
everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts:
encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, and what to
music was the age of impressionist music, Conrad showed himself in many of his
works a prose poet of the highest order: for instance, in the evocative Patna and
courtroom scenes of Lord Jim; in the scenes of the "melancholy-mad elephant" and
the "French gunboat firing into a continent", in Heart of Darkness; in the doubled
protagonists of The Secret Sharer; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of
Nostromo and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'.
Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are
tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole. His "view of the world", or
elements of it, is often described by citing at once both his private and public
statements, passages from his letters, and citations from his books. Najder warns
that this approach produces an incoherent and misleading picture. "An... uncritical
linking of the two spheres, literature and private life, distorts each. Conrad used his
own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused
with the experiences themselves."
Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he had met,
including, in his first novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894), William Charles
28
Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered to "Almayer"
inadvertently. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four
short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination.Conrad
often borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr
(Typhoon), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon ("Youth"), Captain Lingard (Almayer's
Folly and elsewhere), Captain Ellis (The Shadow Line). "Conrad", writes J. I. M.
Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with
actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring
some minor virtuosity to maintain." Thus we never learn the surname of the
protagonist of Lord Jim. Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus',
the authentic name of the ship, the Narcissus, in which he sailed in 1884.
Apart from Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction
were suggested by past or contemporary publicly known events or literary works.
The first half of the 1900 novel Lord Jim (the Patna episode) was inspired by the
real-life 1880 story of the SS Jeddah; the second part, to some extent by the life of
James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. The 1901 short story "Amy
Foster" was inspired partly by an anecdote in Ford Madox Ford's The Cinque Ports
(1900), wherein a shipwrecked sailor from a German merchant ship, unable to
communicate in English, and driven away by the local country people, finally
found shelter in a pigsty.
In Nostromo (completed 1904), the theft of a massive consignment of silver
was suggested to Conrad by a story he had heard in the Gulf of Mexico and later
read about in a "volume picked up outside a second-hand bookshop." The novel's
political strand, according to Maya Jasanoff, is related to the creation of the
Panama Canal. "In January 1903", she writes, "just as Conrad started writing
Nostromo, the US and Colombian secretaries of state signed a treaty granting the
United States a one-hundred-year renewable lease on a six-mile strip flanking the
canal... While the [news]papers murmured about revolution in Colombia, Conrad
opened a fresh section of Nostromo with hints of dissent in Costaguana", his
29
fictional South American country. He plotted a revolution in the Costaguanan
fictional port of Sulaco that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing
in Panama. When Conrad finished the novel on 1 September 1904, writes Jasanoff,
"he left Sulaco in the condition of Panama. As Panama had gotten its independence
instantly recognized by the United States and its economy bolstered by American
investment in the canal, so Sulaco had its independence instantly recognized by the
United States, and its economy underwritten by investment in the [fictional] San
Tomé [silver] mine."
The Secret Agent (completed 1906) was inspired by the French anarchist
Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the
Greenwich Observatory. Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer" (completed 1909) was
inspired by an 1880 incident when Sydney Smith, first mate of the Cutty Sark, had
killed a seaman and fled from justice, aided by the ship's captain. The plot of
Under Western Eyes (completed 1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal
Russian government minister, modelled after the real-life 1904 assassination of
Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The near-novella "Freya
of the Seven Isles" (completed in March 1911) was inspired by a story told to
Conrad by a Malaya old hand and fan of Conrad's, Captain Carlos M. Marris.
For the natural surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and
South America, which Conrad described so vividly, he could rely on his own
observations. What his brief landfalls could not provide was a thorough
understanding of exotic cultures. For this he resorted, like other writers, to literary
sources. When writing his Malayan stories, he consulted Alfred Russel Wallace's
The Malay Archipelago (1869), James Brooke's journals, and books with titles like
Perak and the Malays, My Journal in Malayan Waters, and Life in the Forests of
the Far East. When he set about writing his novel Nostromo, set in the fictional
South American country of Costaguana, he turned to The War between Peru and
Chile; Edward Eastwick, Venezuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American
Republic (1868); and George Frederick Masterman, Seven Eventful Years in
30
Paraguay (1869). As a result of relying on literary sources, in Lord Jim, as J. I. M.
Stewart writes, Conrad's "need to work to some extent from second-hand" led to “a
certain thinness in Jim's relations with the... peoples... of
Patusan...” This
prompted Conrad at some points to alter the nature of Charles Marlow's narrative
to "distance an uncertain command of the detail of Tuan Jim's empire."
In keeping with his scepticism and melancholy, Conrad almost invariably
gives lethal fates to the characters in his principal novels and stories. Almayer
(Almayer's Folly, 1894), abandoned by his beloved daughter, takes to opium, and
dies.[150] Peter Willems (An Outcast of the Islands, 1895) is killed by his jealous
lover Aïssa.[151] The ineffectual "Nigger", James Wait (The Nigger of the
'Narcissus', 1897), dies aboard ship and is buried at sea. Mr. Kurtz (Heart of
Darkness, 1899) expires, uttering the words, "The horror! The horror!" Tuan Jim
(Lord Jim, 1900), having inadvertently precipitated a massacre of his adoptive
community, deliberately walks to his death at the hands of the community's leader.
In Conrad's 1901 short story, "Amy Foster", a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko
Goorall (an English transliteration of the Polish Janko Góral, "Johnny
Highlander"), falls ill and, suffering from a fever, raves in his native language,
frightening his wife Amy, who flees; next morning Yanko dies of heart failure, and
it transpires that he had simply been asking in Polish for water. Captain Whalley
(The End of the Tether, 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and an unscrupulous
partner, drowns himself. Gian' Battista Fidanza, the eponymous respected Italianimmigrant Nostromo (Italian: "Our Man") of the novel Nostromo (1904), illicitly
obtains a treasure of silver mined in the South American country of "Costaguana"
and is shot dead due to mistaken identity. Mr. Verloc, The Secret Agent (1906) of
divided loyalties, attempts a bombing, to be blamed on terrorists, that accidentally
kills his mentally defective brother-in-law Stevie, and Verloc himself is killed by
his distraught wife, who drowns herself by jumping overboard from a channel
steamer. In Chance (1913), Roderick Anthony, a sailing-ship captain, and
benefactor and husband of Flora de Barral, becomes the target of a poisoning
31
attempt by her jealous disgraced financier father who, when detected, swallows the
poison himself and dies (some years later, Captain Anthony drowns at sea). In
Victory (1915), Lena is shot dead by Jones, who had meant to kill his accomplice
Ricardo and later succeeds in doing so, then himself perishes along with another
accomplice, after which Lena's protector Axel Heyst sets fire to his bungalow and
dies beside Lena's body.
When a principal character of Conrad's does escape with his life, he
sometimes does not fare much better. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Razumov
betrays a fellow University of St. Petersburg student, the revolutionist Victor
Haldin, who has assassinated a savagely repressive Russian government minister.
Haldin is tortured and hanged by the authorities. Later Razumov, sent as a
government spy to Geneva, a centre of anti-tsarist intrigue, meets the mother and
sister of Haldin, who share Haldin's liberal convictions. Razumov falls in love with
the sister and confesses his betrayal of her brother; later he makes the same avowal
to assembled revolutionists, and their professional executioner bursts his eardrums,
making him deaf for life. Razumov staggers away, is knocked down by a streetcar,
and finally returns as a cripple to Russia.
Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works. In
1898, at the start of his writing career, he had written to his Scottish writerpolitician friend Cunninghame Graham: "What makes mankind tragic is not that
they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. As soon as you
know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins." But in
1922, near the end of his life and career, when another Scottish friend, Richard
Curle, sent Conrad proofs of two articles he had written about Conrad, the latter
objected to being characterised as a gloomy and tragic writer. "That reputation...
has deprived me of innumerable readers... I absolutely object to being called a
tragedian."
32
3. The main elements in the novel.
Conrad claimed that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook."
John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as "a statement which
surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature
of his creative spirit."[162] Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, Richard Curle
published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences
in the Congo; in 1978 a more complete version was published as The Congo Diary
and Other Uncollected Pieces. The first accurate transcription was published in
Robert Hampson's Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness in 1995; Hampson's
transcription and annotations were reprinted in the Penguin edition of 2007.
Unlike many authors who make it a point not to discuss work in progress,
Conrad often did discuss his current work and even showed it to select friends and
fellow authors, such as Edward Garnett, and sometimes modified it in the light of
their critiques and suggestions.
Edward Said was struck by the sheer quantity of Conrad's correspondence
with friends and fellow writers; by 1966, it "amount to eight published volumes".
Edward Said comments: "It seemed to me that if Conrad wrote of himself, of the
problem of self-definition, with such sustained urgency, some of what he wrote
must have had meaning for his fiction. It was difficult to believe that a man would
be so uneconomical as to pour himself out in letter after letter and then not use and
reformulate his insights and discoveries in his fiction." Edward Said found
especially close parallels between Conrad's letters and his shorter fiction.
"Conrad... believed... that artistic distinction was more tellingly demonstrated in a
shorter rather than a longer work.... He believed that his [own] life was like a series
of short episodes... because he was himself so many different people...: he was a
Pole and an Englishman, a sailor and a writer." Another scholar, Najder, writes:
Throughout almost his entire life Conrad was an outsider and felt himself to
be one. An outsider in exile; an outsider during his visits to his family in the
Ukraine; an outsider—because of his experiences and bereavement—in Kraków
33
and Lwów; an outsider in Marseilles; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on
British ships; an outsider as an English writer.... Conrad called himself (to
Graham) a "bloody foreigner." At the same time... [h]e regarded "the national
spirit" as the only truly permanent and reliable element of communal life.
Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an
extent sometimes skirting plagiarism. When the Polish translation of his 1915
novel Victory appeared in 1931, readers noted striking similarities to Stefan
Żeromski's kitschy novel, The History of a Sin (Dzieje grzechu, 1908), including
their endings. Comparative-literature scholar Yves Hervouet has demonstrated in
the text of Victory a whole mosaic of influences, borrowings, similarities and
allusions. He further lists hundreds of concrete borrowings from other, mostly
French authors in nearly all of Conrad's works, from Almayer's Folly (1895) to his
unfinished Suspense. Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw
material of the same kind as the content of his own memory. Materials borrowed
from other authors often functioned as allusions. Moreover, he had a phenomenal
memory for texts and remembered details, "but [writes Najder] it was not a
memory strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous
entities; it was, rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he
would draw."
Continues Najder: "[H]e can never be accused of outright plagiarism. Even
when lifting sentences and scenes, Conrad changed their character, inserted them
within novel structures. He did not imitate, but (as Hervouet says) 'continued' his
masters. He was right in saying: 'I don't resemble anybody.' Ian Watt put it
succinctly: 'In a sense, Conrad is the least derivative of writers; he wrote very little
that could possibly be mistaken for the work of anyone else.'Conrad's acquaintance
George Bernard Shaw says it well: "man can no more be completely original than
a tree can grow out of air."
Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to
propitiate his audience and confirm its own favourable self-regard. This may
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account for his describing the admirable crew of the Judea in his 1898 story
"Youth" as "Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the Judea's actual 1882
prototype, the Palestine, had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew
had been non-Britons; and for Conrad's turning the real-life 1880 criminally
negligent British Captain J. L. Clark, of the SS Jeddah, in his 1900 novel Lord Jim,
into the captain of the fictitious Patna—"a sort of renegade New South Wales
German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby
elephant. "Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career,
struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the
predilections of his correspondents. And when he wished to criticize the conduct
of European imperialism in what would later be termed the "Third World", he
turned his gaze upon the Dutch and Belgian colonies, not upon the British Empire.
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially
compared to those of near-contemporaries like his friend and frequent benefactor
John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to
Graham Greene. But where "Greeneland" has been characterised as a recurring and
recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a
sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village; often he chose to have his
characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances. In the
view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of
Anthony Powell's sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, were published in the
1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and
precision of language with consistency, a view supported by later critics like A. N.
Wilson; Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad. Leo Gurko, too, remarks, as
"one of Conrad's special qualities, his abnormal awareness of place, an awareness
magnified to almost a new dimension in art, an ecological dimension defining the
relationship between earth and man."
T. E. Lawrence, one of many writers whom Conrad befriended, offered
some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:
35
He's absolutely the most haunting thing in prose that ever was: I wish I knew
how every paragraph he writes (...they are all paragraphs: he seldom writes a single
sentence...) goes on sounding in waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops.
It's not built in the rhythm of ordinary prose, but on something existing only in his
head, and as he can never say what it is he wants to say, all his things end in a kind
of hunger, a suggestion of something he can't say or do or think. So his books
always look bigger than they are. He's as much a giant of the subjective as Kipling
is of the objective. Do they hate one another?
The Irish novelist-poet-critic Colm Tóibín captures something similar:
Joseph Conrad's heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger.
Sometimes, when Conrad's imagination was at its most fertile and his command of
English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other
times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to
evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While
his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail,
it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often
left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.
His own vague terms—words like "ineffable", "infinite", "mysterious",
"unknowable"—were as close as he could come to a sense of our fate in the world
or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond the time he described
and beyond his characters' circumstances. This idea of "beyond" satisfied
something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems
of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.
This irreconcilable distance between what was precise and what was
shimmering made him much more than a novelist of adventure, a chronicler of the
issues that haunted his time, or a writer who dramatized moral questions. This left
him open to interpretation—and indeed to attack.
In a letter of 14 December 1897 to his Scottish friend, Robert Bontine
Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote that science tells us, "Understand that thou
36
art nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the
ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream."
In a letter of 20 December 1897 to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad
metaphorically described the universe as a huge machine:
It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and
behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it
ought to embroider—but it goes on knitting. You come and say: "this is all right;
it's only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this—for instance—celestial
oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold."
Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a
knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has
made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight,
without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident—and it has happened. You can't
interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can't even
smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that
made it spring into existence it is what it is—and it is indestructible! It knits us in
and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all
the illusions—and nothing matters.
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CONCLUSION
The Forsyte Saga, first published under that title in 1922, is a series of three
novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by the English author
John Galsworthy, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. They chronicle the
vicissitudes of the leading members of a large upper-middle-class English family
that is similar to Galsworthy's. Only a few generations removed from their farmer
ancestors, its members are keenly aware of their status as "new money". The main
character, the solicitor and connoisseur Soames Forsyte, sees himself as a "man of
property" by virtue of his ability to accumulate material possessions, but that does
not succeed in bringing him pleasure.
Separate sections of the saga, as well as the lengthy story in its entirely, have
been adapted for cinema and television. The Man of Property, the first book, was
adapted in 1949 by Hollywood as That Forsyte Woman, starring Errol Flynn,
Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young. In 1967, the BBC produced a
popular 26-part serial that dramatised The Forsyte Saga and a subsequent trilogy
concerning the Forsytes, A Modern Comedy. In 2002 Granada Television
produced two series for the ITV network: The Forsyte Saga and The Forsyte Saga:
To Let. Both made runs in the U.S. as parts of Masterpiece Theatre. In 2003, The
Forsyte Saga was listed as on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved
novel".
In this first novel of the Forsyte Saga, after introducing us to the impressive
array of Forsytes headed by the formidable Aunt Ann, Galsworthy moves into the
main action of the saga by detailing Soames Forsyte's desire to own things,
including his beautiful wife, Irene Forsyte (née Heron). He is jealous of her
friendships and wants her to be his alone. He concocts a plan to move her to a
house he is having built at Robin Hill, away from everyone she knows and cares
for. She resists his grasping intentions, and falls in love with the architect Philip
Bosinney, who has been engaged by Soames to build the house. Bosinney returns
her love, although he is the fiancé of her young friend June Forsyte, the daughter of
38
Soames's estranged cousin "Young" Jolyon. There is no happy ending: Irene leaves
Soames after he asserts what he perceives to be his ultimate right on his property
by raping her, and Bosinney dies under the wheels of a bus after being driven
frantic by the news of the rape.
39
THE LIST OF USED LITERATURE
1."New Books, 2006" (PDF).
2. "BBC – The Big Read". April 2003, Retrieved 31 October 2012.
3. "The Museum of Broadcast Communications – Encyclopedia of Television".
museum.tv. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
4. "John Galsworthy – The Forsyte Saga". BBC Radio 4.
5. "Fiction Book Review: The Forsytes by Suleika Dawson ISBN 978-0-38530849-6". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 30 September 2018.
6. Bradbury, Malcolm (21 August 2000). "Can we love the Forsytes as before?".
New Statesman. 129 (4500): 7. Retrieved 26 May 2020.
7. No byline (30 September 2002), "TV worth watching" . Maclean's. 115 (39):56
8. Poniewozik, James (7 October 2002). "Still Your Grandfather's PBS". Time. 160
(15): 94. Archived from the original on 3 October 2020. Retrieved 26 May 2020.
9. Kelleher, Terry (14 October 2002), "The Forsyte Saga". People. 58 (16):36
10. John Galsworthy (2015). The Forsyte saga: The Complete Series (DVD). PBS
Distribution. ISBN 978-1-62789-325-1. OCLC 908116845.
11.Galsworthy, John (2002). The Forsyte Saga. Wordsworth Editions. ISBN 9781-84022-438-2. Retrieved 26 May 2020.
12.Smith, Rupert (2002). The Forsyte Saga: The Official Companion. Granada
Media. ISBN 978-0-233-05042-3. Retrieved 26 May 2020.
13.The Forsyte Saga, Series I, at PBS (archived)
14.The Forsyte Saga, Series II (To Let), at PBS (archived)
15.The Forsyte Saga at IMDb
16.The Forsyte Saga: To Let at IMDb
17.The Forsyte Saga: To Let (Q7734871) on Wikidata
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