Editing John Galsworthy (section)

===Novels===

[[File:Galsworthy-spines.jpg|thumb|left|upright|alt=three book spines, green binding with yellow labels, reading "The Forsyte Saga, Vol 1, 2 and 3"|261x261px|Galsworthy's ''The Forsyte Saga'']]

Of Galsworthy's 20 novels, nine are about the Forsytes, the last three tangentially so, and the other eleven are all one-off stories.<ref name=list/> In a 1982 study, Alec Fréchet analyses a comment that Galsworthy made in looking back at his works in the mid-1920s, that the novels reflected the battle between the emotional and critical sides of his nature:

{{Blockquote|text=My early work was certainly more emotional than critical. But from 1901 came nine years when the critical was, in the main, holding sway. From 1910 to 1918 the emotional again struggled for the upper hand; and from that time on there seems to have been something of a "dead heat".<ref name=periods>Fréchet, pp. 57–58.</ref>|source=}}

From this, Fréchet divides the novels into five periods: the first consisting of the two early ones, ''Jocelyn'' (1898) and ''Villa Rubein'' (1900). Between 1901 and 1909 there were four novels characterised as "critical"—''The Island Pharisees'' (1904), ''The Man of Property'' (1906), ''The Country House'' (1907)  and ''Fraternity'' (1909). These books reflect the author's disparaging view of various aspects of [[English society|British society]], such as hypocrisy, selfishness and exploitation of the poor and women of all classes.<ref name="periods" /> His censure was seen in conservative circles as scandalous, and the author was regarded by some as a traitor to his own class.<ref>Fréchet, p. 66.</ref> He further offended conservatives by his attacks on [[imperialism]]; in ''The Island Pharisees'' he wrote, "Why should we, a small portion of the world's population, assume that our standards are the proper ones for every kind of race?"<ref>Fréchet, p. 180.</ref>

The next period, from 1910 to 1919, produced six novels categorised as "lyrical" or "war-time": ''The Patrician'' (1911), ''The Dark Flower'' (1913), ''The Freelands'' (1915), ''Beyond'' (1917), ''The Burning Spear'' (1919) and ''Saint's Progress'' (1919). After these Fréchet lists the 1920–1928 Forsyte novels as a category of their own: ''In Chancery'' (1920), ''To Let'' (1921), ''The White Monkey'' (1924), ''The Silver Spoon'' (1926) and ''Swan Song'' (1928). The last group in Fréchet's summary of Galsworthy's classifications consists of the final trilogy: ''Maid in Waiting'' (1931), ''Flowering Wilderness'' (1932) and ''Over the River'' (completed in 1932).<ref name=periods/>

Fréchet comments that the recurring themes of Galsworthy's novels are, in order of importance: beauty, love and suffering, divorce, honour, art and the law. "Beauty comes first, because in every case it coincides with love: the beloved woman is always very beautiful; but not only women: the natural setting for the action is also unfailingly lovely. The beauty of a woman and the beauty of nature are of the same kind."<ref>Fréchet, p. 109.</ref> Money and family are important features, but generally as the background to, rather than the crux of, the plot.<ref>Fréchet, pp. 115 and 120–121.</ref>