To Let is book three of the Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy's monumental chronicle of the lives of the moneyed Forsytes, a family whose values are at war with its passions.
In To Let, Jon and Fleur, now both nineteen years old, fall in love. However, when Jolyon informs his son of the past feud between the families, Jon decides that he cannot marry Fleur. Instead he travels to America, where his mother Irene later joins him. Fleur now throws herself at a long-standing admirer, Michael Mont, a fashionable baronet’s son, and the two are married.
Soames learns that his second wife, Annette, has been unfaithful to him and is left desolately contemplating the sale of Robin Hill. The Forsyte family begins to disintegrate when Timothy Forsythe, the last of the old generation, dies at the age of 100.
A social satire of epic proportions and one that does not suffer by comparison with Thackeray's Vanity Fair...the whole comedy of manners, convincing both in its fidelity to life and as a work of art.
John Galsworthy (1867-1933), English novelist and playwright, went to Oxford to study law, but turned to literature after he met Joseph Conrad on a voyage. The Man of Property (1906), the first of the novels that became The Forsyte Saga, established his reputation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.
