Best books… Simon Heffer

Simon Heffer, the journalist and historian, picks six great novels of the Edwardian era – a period covered in his new book The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914, published by Random House Books at £30

The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, 1906-1921 (OUP £10.99). Looking back to the 1880s, the book combines nostalgia and a restrained melancholy in painting its picture of a newly-risen uppermiddle class. Galsworthy’s characterisations are impeccable, his storytelling compelling and this book a masterpiece.

The Card by Arnold Bennett, 1911 (Penguin £8.99). Bennett’s creation, the self-made man Denry Machin, proves that Edwardian England was a place of rapid social mobility; he also shows how life had its lighter side, as Machin exemplifies what Bennett calls “the great cause of cheering us all up”.

When William Came by Saki, 1913 (Dodo Press £7.99). A dark, exquisitely written novella penned the year before the Great War about how a complacent, careless Britain allowed Germany to invade it. Although shot through with the author’s unpleasant antiSemitism, it is a biting account of national lassitude.

Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie, 1913-14 (Faber £25). A now shamefully almost forgotten novel of adolescence, with strongly evocative depictions of west London and Oxford, which scandalised a generation because the hero and his sister were born to rich, unmarried parents, embodying the decadence of the time.

Tono-bungay by H.G. Wells, 1909 (Penguin £12). This semiautobiographical story (as much of Wells’s writing is) of a young man whose uncle makes a useless patent medicine, but who then develops a remarkable career for himself, is also a consummate satire on Edwardian society, and perhaps Wells’s most literary novel.

Howards End by E.M. Forster, 1910 (Everyman £10.99). Hailed as the first modernist novel, it is also a beautifully told story of two sisters, friendship, change, nostalgia, betrayal and snobbery. Never was there a more devastating attack on the class system, and on the shallowness of “new money”, as in Forster’s book.