Multi-cultural Education

…Galsworthy's (1867 - 1933) place in the history of English literature rests on the vast social chronicle comprising his three trilogies, The Forsyte Saga (1922), A Modern Comedy (1929) and End of the Chapter (1935). The single-volume edition of The Forsyte Saga has been extremely popular, while the BBC television dramatization in 1967, the centenary of Galsworthy's birth, attracted an extraordinary number of viewers. The Forsyte family represents the distinctive ideology of the English commercial upper-middle class. Its instinct of possession, its sole means of self-definition and evolution, is distilled in the portrait of the dry solicitor and art collector Soames Forsyte and his tortured relationship with his wife, Irene. Soames's obsessive love for his daughter Fleur is pursued in the second trilogy, A Modern Comedy (1929), comprising The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), and Swan Song (1928). Galsworthy's fiction centres on his own social class, whose instincts and ideology he largely repudiates. He is critical of its insularity, materialism, aesthetic deficiency, chauvinism, restrictive moral codes, and imperialism. His exploration of the febrile world of 1920s society includes his treatment of the general strike, in which Fleur and her friends are caught up, and culminates with the death of Soames. Though critical interest had waned, this second trilogy was extremely popular, and Swan Song, with its greater social depth, emotional range, and narrative subtlety, is among the best of Galsworthy's writing…(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)