John Galsworthy wrote The Forsyte Saga — a three-volume chronicle of an English bourgeois family from the Victorian age to the 1920s. Chronicle and verdict at once: the Forsytes are rich, respectable, and incapable of love.
Born in Surrey in 1867, the son of a solicitor, he took a law degree at Oxford and never practised for a day. He travelled instead, and aboard a ship met Joseph Conrad — who talked him into writing.
The Man of Property, In Chancery, To Let: the first Forsyte trilogy. Soames Forsyte is a man of property who cannot grasp that a wife is not a possession. Irene is beauty that cannot be bought.
The Nobel Prize came in 1932; he died the same year. The saga has been filmed again and again — British television is still making series of it.