The Forsyte family owns everything they touch. That's their tragedy. John Galsworthy charts the rise and slow crumble of a dynasty through three generations of wealthy Victorians who measure love in property deeds and happiness in quarterly dividends. At the center stands Soames Forsyte, a solicitor of formidable talents and zero emotional imagination, who treats his beautiful wife Irene as another asset to be secured. When she falls in love with his own nephew, the family machinery of respectable destruction grinds into motion. What follows is a saga of stunning psychological precision: the family gatherings weighted with unspoken resentments, the inheritance battles fought in lawyers' offices, the slow erosion of fortune and reputation through the seismic shifts of English society from the 1880s to the 1920s. Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for this, and the reason is clear: he wrote the great English novel about money. Not just having it, but what it does to the people who worship it. The Forsytes are never cruel in obvious ways. They are worse. They are loving in a possessive, stranglehold way that suffocates everyone in their orbit. If you've ever sat at a family dinner where everyone is being polite and everyone hates each other, you already know this world.
