End of the Chapter - Book I - Maid in Waiting

John Galsworthy OM was an English dramatist and novelist who lived from 14 August 1867 to 31 January 1933. His novels, The Forsyte Saga, and two more trilogies, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter, are his best-known works. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. Galsworthy, who came from a wealthy upper-middle-class family, was expected to become a lawyer, but he found the profession unappealing, so he resorted to literature. Before his first book, The Man of Property, about the Forsyte family, was released in 1897, he was thirty years old. It wasn't until that book-the first of its kind-that he saw true popularity. His debut play, The Silver Box, had its London premiere the same year. As a writer, he gained notoriety for his socially conscious plays that addressed issues such as the politics and morality of war, the persecution of women, the use of solitary confinement in prisons, the battle of workers against exploitation, and jingoism. The patriarch, Old Jolyon, is based on Galsworthy's father, and the Forsyte family in the collection of books and short tales known as The Forsyte Chronicles is comparable to Galsworthy's family in many aspects.

The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy's trilogy about the eponymous family and connected lives. These books, as with many of his other works, deal with social class, upper-middle class lives in particular. Although sympathetic to his characters, he highlights their insular, snobbish, and acquisitive attitudes and their suffocating moral codes. He is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era who challenged some of the ideals of society depicted in the preceding literature of Victorian England. The depiction of a woman in an unhappy marriage furnishes another recurring theme in his work.John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright. This is Volume one of his most notable work The Forsyte Saga. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.