This is the first in a series of novels which is part of how Galsworthy won the Nobel. I enjoyed it, but I am not sure if I will read the whole 1000 page saga which I am told is ‘three novels and two interludes,’ wtf is an interlude. Anyway, this first novel tells about the unhappy marriage of Soames Forsyte and his wife Irene. Forsyte comes from a robustly bourgeois background, while Irene is poor. I have not googled it but I am 100% sure Galsworthy comes from a family with money, because he spends a lot of time banging on about how awful families with money are, how obsessed with property, etc
The couple have little in common and she SPOILER ALERT begins an emotional affair with her husband’s architect. She had already ‘locked her door’ to Soames, and eventually he becomes so enraged that he ‘asserted his rights and acted like a man’. I was really impressed that a book written this early takes marital rape so seriously. Irene is extremely distressed, and the architect is too, ending up killed in a carriage accident. Soames meanwhile is upset too, but mostly because he can’t understand why Irene won’t just accept that she, just like their big house, is his property.