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The Country House

John Galsworthy

Book Overview: 

In “The Country House”, John Galsworthy explores many of the themes he would later expand upon in his better known, nine-novel, “The Forsyth Saga”. This is a novel of English society as 1900 approaches. A divorce is being threatened in the Pendyce family, whose members are of the landed gentry. Such an event would be an enormous scandal. There is little action. The story paints, in exquisite language, the feelings of each of the six or so main characters. These feelings concern the necessity for family honor and the horror of scandal; the stifling effect of the social mores of the time; the ridiculous complications of the law; and, the threat of the many changes in the social order which seem to be coming. Galsworthy was himself of this privileged class. While he was extremely critical of the social structure of the time, he shows sympathy for those caught in it. Each is constrained to his or her niche; only by major changes in the social code will that be changed. Gaslworthy was very much a social activist in life, as well as on the printed page. He was quite successful in showing the reader how it must have felt to live in one of those social niches.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .In the Pendyces' pew the two girls sang loudly and with a certain sweetness. Mr. Pendyce, too, sang, and once or twice he looked in surprise at his brother, as though he were not making a creditable noise.

Mrs. Pendyce did not sing, but her lips moved, and her eyes followed the millions of little dust atoms dancing in the long slanting sunbeam. Its gold path canted slowly from her, then, as by magic, vanished. Mrs. Pendyce let her eyes fall. Something had fled from her soul with the sunbeam; her lips moved no more.

The Squire sang two loud notes, spoke three, sang two again; the Psalms ceased. He left his seat, and placing his hands on the lectern's sides, leaned forward and began to read the Lesson. He read the story of Abraham and Lot, and of their flocks and herds, and how they could not dwell together, and as he read, hypnotised by the sound of his own voice, he was thinking:

'This Lesson is well read by me, Horace Pendyce. I am Horac. . . Read More

Community Reviews

M-am apucat de cartea aceasta ca să-mi scutur puțin conștiința de „vina” de a nu fi citit „Forsyte Saga”.

Lectura a fost o încîntare de la un capăt la altul și pe toate palierele.

Ce atmosferă, ce simț al detaliului în descrierile vizuale, cu elemente olfactive, auditive, de mimică și de gestică ale p

I was very moved by this little story.

In Victorian England in the early 1890s, it was very much—and very incongruously—a man’s world in a number of ways. Among the landed gentry, for example, property ownership was almost entirely the exclusive purview of men. Indeed, the feudal “law of entail” was such that property passed from father

Read this for delight of watching a master skewer the turn of the century British class system. Could be a quick read, but better read slowly for his exquisite choice of language and fine dry wit.

It seems to me that the title The Country House refers not just to the inherited property of the Pendyce family but to the Country House of England at the turn of the 20th century. A new age is approaching and the conservative land-owning class is under direct threat. In the Pendyce family, a divorc

As a longtime devotee of Galsworthy in
general and The Forsyte Trilogies in particular, I was eager to read this and was not disappointed. It is prime, first rate Galsworthy written with supreme style and insight into his characters. Language and character are everything here. If you, like some revi

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