The Forsyte Saga, Volume I.: The Man of Property
Soames Forsyte has spent his life accumulating beautiful things: houses, paintings, the finest investments. His most prized acquisition is his wife Irene, whom he keeps like a painting in a climate-controlled room. But Irene has a soul that cannot be catalogued or insured. When she falls in love with Philip Bosinney, a penniless architect who represents everything the Forsytes despise, the carefully constructed world of upper-middle-class Victorian England begins to crack. Bosinney is everything Soames is not: indifferent to money, passionate about beauty, unwilling to play the game of social advancement. The affair that follows is not merely a scandal, but an unveiling of everything the Forsyte family has tried to bury beneath their polished manners and substantial bank accounts. Galsworthy writes with surgical precision about the collision between emotional truth and social convention, revealing how the worship of property becomes a prison for those who practice it. This is a novel about what happens when love is treated as another asset to be managed, and beauty becomes a thing to be owned.
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“Youth, like a flame, burned ever in his breast, and to youth he turned, to the round little limbs, so reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces so unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the shrill, chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and the feel of small bodies against his legs, to all that was young and young, and once more young.””
— John Galsworthy
“His natural taciturnity was in his favour; nothing could be more calculated to give people, especially people with property (Soames had no other clients), the impression that he was a safe man. And he was safe. [...] How could he fall, when his soul abhorred circumstances which render a fall possible - a man cannot fall off the floor!””
— John Galsworthy
“that slow and beautiful decay which flings crowns underfoot to star the earth with fallen glories,””
— John Galsworthy
“And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and that ‘family’ and the sense of home and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts to ‘talk them out.””
— John Galsworthy
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Galsworthy, John. The Forsyte Saga, Volume I.: The Man of Property. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-forsyte-saga-volume-i-the-man-of-property-a422cdf2-c8b6-4ffe-948f-62a685f50d63.Galsworthy, J. (n.d.). The Forsyte Saga, Volume I.: The Man of Property. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-forsyte-saga-volume-i-the-man-of-property-a422cdf2-c8b6-4ffe-948f-62a685f50d63Galsworthy, John. The Forsyte Saga, Volume I.: The Man of Property. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-forsyte-saga-volume-i-the-man-of-property-a422cdf2-c8b6-4ffe-948f-62a685f50d63.
