Recommendations
Books Like The Forsyte Saga
What to read after The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga (beginning with A Man of Property, 1906) is the great English family saga of the Victorian and Edwardian middle class — Soames Forsyte, who owns everything and cannot possess the one thing he wants. The Nobel Prize-winning portrait of an England in the process of becoming something else. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart's destruction by Gilded Age New York — the American companion to The Forsyte Saga; Wharton and Galsworthy are exact contemporaries and both are writing about the same moment in history (the first decade of the twentieth century) from opposite sides of the Atlantic; where Galsworthy's Soames Forsyte is the possessive man who cannot understand what he lacks, Wharton's Lily Bart is the beautiful woman who cannot understand what she is up against
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska in Old New York — the Pulitzer Prize-winning companion to The Forsyte Saga in the literature of propriety and suppressed feeling; where Galsworthy shows the English upper-middle class from within its own assumptions, Wharton shows the American equivalent with a slightly more ironic detachment
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Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family from 1835 to 1877 — Mann's first and most accessible novel and the German companion to The Forsyte Saga; where Galsworthy shows the English property-owning class across three generations, Mann shows a German merchant family across four; published in 1901, five years before A Man of Property, and the major European precedent for Galsworthy's project
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler and the world of Darlington Hall — the twentieth-century English novel most directly in the elegiac tradition of The Forsyte Saga: a portrait of an England that is passing, viewed through the consciousness of someone formed by it and unable to see it clearly; where Galsworthy's elegiac perspective is that of the family itself, Ishiguro's is that of a servant
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate in provincial England — the great Victorian predecessor to The Forsyte Saga in the tradition of the English social novel; where Galsworthy focuses on property and class, Eliot focuses on moral psychology and the life of the community; the most ambitious English novel of the century before A Man of Property and the essential context for understanding what Galsworthy is doing
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Howard's End
by E.M. Forster
The Schlegels and the Wilcoxes and the question of who shall inherit Howard's End — Forster's masterpiece and the most direct contemporary of The Forsyte Saga in Edwardian English fiction; where Galsworthy shows the property instinct from within, Forster shows it from outside through the contrast between the Schlegels (culture) and the Wilcoxes (commerce); 'Only connect' is the thesis where Galsworthy's could be 'They cannot connect'
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The Pursuit of Love
by Nancy Mitford
Linda Radlett and her cousins growing up in an eccentric English aristocratic family between the wars — the lighter, comic companion to The Forsyte Saga in the literature of the English upper class; where Galsworthy is earnest and tragic, Mitford is funny and elegiac; both are portraits of an English world that the authors knew from the inside and that was ending as they wrote
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The Warden
by Anthony Trollope
The Reverend Septimus Harding and the income of Hiram's Hospital — Trollope is the great Victorian predecessor to Galsworthy in the English tradition of fiction about property, class, and the social conscience; The Warden (1855) is the best starting point for Trollope and shows the same concerns as A Man of Property applied to the Victorian church rather than the Victorian middle class
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