The Forsyte Saga

Three novels on the Forsytes, a family of property: Soames buys a wife and a house and cannot own either, and the consequences run through his daughter and Irene's son to the year Galsworthy was writing. The first volume appeared in 1906 and the trilogy was completed in 1921; the Nobel Prize followed in 1932. Soames is the villain of the first book and something else entirely by the last, which is the saga's real achievement. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Tissot and John Atkinson Grimshaw follow the saga's property and money through dockyards, quaysides, dinner parties and the House of Lords.