The Forsytes begin in Dorset. The recorded line opens with a farmer, Jolyon Forsyte (1741-1812), but the London fortune is the work of his son, the builder Jolyon Forsyte (1770-1850), known in the family as 'Superior Dosset', who moved his clan to town and fathered ten children who made property into a religion. Ann, Old Jolyon, James, Swithin, Roger, Juley, Hester, Nicholas, Timothy and Susan are the first generation of John Galsworthy's saga — tea merchants, solicitors, financiers, collectors of houses — and the tree that grows from them is one of the most closely observed family diagrams in English fiction, drawn as a case study in what money does to affection.
The fracture runs through the second generation. Old Jolyon (1806-1892) cut off his son, young Jolyon, for fourteen years after Jo left his first wife for June's governess, Hélène Hilmer; the old man reconciled only at the end, when his last devotion was a chaste one to Irene. James's son Soames (1855-1926), 'the man of property', married Irene Heron though she did not love him, and asserted his rights over her in 1887 — the wound that shapes everything after. Irene loved Philip Bosinney, the architect of Robin Hill, who was engaged to June; Soames ruined Bosinney in court and Bosinney died in the fog. Irene later married young Jolyon; June, devastated, in time forgave her.
The third and fourth generations inherit the quarrel rather than the houses. Winifred Dartie endured Montague Dartie's gambling and elopement; their son Val married Holly Forsyte and kept deliberately clear of the feud, while Jolly Forsyte, quarrelling with Val over it, enlisted for the Boer War and died of enteric fever in the Transvaal in 1900. Soames married Annette Lamotte for an heir and got Fleur (1901); Irene and young Jolyon had Jon the same year. The cousins fell in love, and the old adultery parted them: Jon went to America and married Anne Wilmot, Fleur married Michael Mont and had Kit, and Soames died in 1926 after pushing his daughter clear of a falling picture.
This tree follows Galsworthy's own chronology across the nine novels and interludes published between The Man of Property (1906) and Over the River (1933), collected as The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. Galsworthy was scrupulous about dates and legacies — he even supplied a family tree — because the point was documentary: Timothy, the last brother, survives to 1920 and dies aged 101, in his hundred-and-first year, a Victorian relic outliving his world. The saga won its author the Nobel Prize in 1932 and remains the standard English portrait of the propertied middle class watching itself dissolve.
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