The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
Published 1922 · 437 pages · 316,833 words · about 21 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is The Forsyte Saga to read?
The Forsyte Saga scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Galsworthy writes clear Victorian prose with period terms like consols, hansom, barouche and Dundreary whiskers. The vocabulary is more accessible than The Great Gatsby's polish.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Sentences run long, with nested clauses and parenthetical asides in the narrator's analyses of the Forsytes. Dialogue is short and clipped. This is less ornate than Anna Karenina.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Property, beauty and the family 'soul' are the abstractions, but they are tied to concrete scenes: a dinner, a house, a funeral. Social observation is more concrete than in The Great Gatsby.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Many family members, houses and incomes appear quickly, and the reader must track the clan. The plot itself moves steadily, so density sits near Gatsby.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Irene is seen only through others' senses, and the central affair is shown through gossip and glances. The narrator comments openly, though, so inference is lighter than in The Great Gatsby.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The house, the hat, the oak and the saddle of mutton recur as signs of property and beauty. They are clearly signposted, like the symbols in 1984.
- Ironic distance: 66 out of 100
- The narrator mocks the Forsytes' possessiveness while granting them sympathy. The dinner at Swithin's and the shareholder meeting show a steady gap between what is said and what is meant.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The extract builds toward a crisis without resolving it, and the preface hints at tragedy. As a first volume of a saga the book remains open, though the central plot closes.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- The chapters are largely chronological, with brief flashbacks to Soames's courtship and Old Jolyon's past. The shifts of point of view between family members are simple, closer to War and Peace in clarity.
How The Forsyte Saga is regarded
The Forsyte Saga holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Nobel Prize in Literature 1932, awarded to John Galsworthy
Where the story of The Forsyte Saga takes place
- Late-Victorian and Edwardian London, 1886-1920 (1886 to 1920), the main setting