Forsythia

Encased within the drama of John Galsworthy's "The Forsyte Saga," Peter Hovenden Longley weaves an autobiographical reminiscence of his own English family from the 1880s to the 1960s. Brought up in the last days of Forsythia, a world of the 3 percent born in privilege to serve the British Empire, Longley celebrates his family's lost generations. Nothing-neither the abdication of the King Emperor Edward VIII in 1936 nor Adolf Hitler's relentless bombs-could shake the British people's conviction that theirs was the eternal kingdom. Blindly, they believed that after a good cup of strong, Indian tea and a game of croquet on the lawn, Forsythia would go on forever.

But in the aftermath of the Boer War, the Irish rebellion, the Great War, and the rise of socialism, even the faith of most stalwart champions of the empire would be shaken. Forced to accept that the world they once loved was changing around them, Longley's family and their peers struggled to adapt to a new reality. As a living witness to his family's history, Longley takes the reader through the Second World War, the independence and division of India, and the gradual dissolution of the empire itself.

With the permission of the Galsworthy estate, Longley analyzes "The Forsyte Saga" and reflects on the impact of this work of literature. His was the last generation of Forsytes, witnesses to those final rays that filtered across the empire on which they all thought the sun would never set.