The three novels which make up the Forsyte Saga chronicle the ebbing social power of the commercial upper-middle0class Forsyte family between 1886 and 1920. Soames Forsyte is the brilliantly portrayed central figure, a Victorian who outlives the age, and whose baffled passion for his beautiful but unresponsive wife Irene reverberates throughout the saga. Written with both compassion adn ironic detachment, Galsworthy's masterly narrative examines not only the family's fortunes but also the wider social developments, particularly the changing position of women in an intensley competitive male world. Above all, Galsworthy is concerned with the conflict at the heart of English culture between the soulless materialism of wealth and property ad the humane instincts of love, beauty, and art.