This book starts out very slow. A snooty British family, wealthy elites but not aristocratic, more upper-middle class than upper-class, is having issues because one of the girls in the family is engaged to a young architect. The architect is hired to build a house for the girl's uncle, and winds up having an affair with the uncle's young, pretty wife. The story starts out in the late 1800's and society is starting to change towards a world of expanded women's rights and a less rigid class structure, so while the older members of the Forsyte family react with the expected horror and disgust their class ought to feel for scandalous entanglements, the younger members of the family are not so convinced.
Over the next few years even more scandalous things happen, and at the same time the world around the Forsytes is changing more rapidly.
This was a long novel, and it felt long for the first 300-400pgs, but the second half was well paced and engaging. I liked the way this book explored how much society changed over the decades leading into WW1. This book was in fact first published just at the end of WW1, so the book's characters can have no real idea how much their world would be changing once the Great Depression and WW2 had their effects.
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This was the first of the three trilogies Galsworthy wrote about the eponymous family of successful upper middle class lawyers and businessmen, whom he uses to stand for a certain Victorian, English set of attitudes and values focused on the primacy of money, social position, respectability and security.

The lawyer Soames Forsyte has a central position in all three novels: he’s an almost-perfect embodiment of Forsyteism, his idea of himself as a Man of Property invariably trumping any distant echoes of aesthetic sense or human feeling that get through to him. In the first novel we see his despotic possession of his wife Irene fall apart when she falls for the distinctly un-Forsyteish architect Philip; in the second we find him being pushed into a position where his desire for a child forces him into the ultimate sacrifice of respectability, a passage through the divorce court; and in the third he is pushed towards another major sacrifice of reputation for the sake of his daughter.

Galsworthy writes with a Trollope-like irony towards his characters (and a very Trollope-like fascination with legal quirks), but it’s informed by a 20th-century scepticism about Victorian values, written in the aftermath of the humiliation of South Africa and (in the last book) the horrors of the Great War. And a certain sense of nostalgia, too: when Timothy Forsyte, last of the Victorian generation, is interred in Highgate Cemetery, it’s a bit like the death of Emperor Franz-Joseph. Oddly, he doesn’t have anything to say about the Women’s Suffrage movement, but he does stress how Victorian law and custom were used to oppress women, and puts in his own plea for a long-overdue reform of divorce laws. ( )

If you despise the upper middle class as I do, with their tiresome entitlement, you will know why I gave this work five stars. Despite its sexist-ness (see page 595), and racist-ness (re: what the characters say about the time of the Boer war), it's still a delicious read. ( )

921 pages and I didn't want it to end. ( )

A lovely long book. I am glad I finally read this classic. Following three generations of the Forsythe family it provides a look at genteel England from the mid 1800’s to after World War II. I’m still pondering if I am glad the book ended the way it did or another ending would have been preferable. Whatever my opinion is, it is clear the the tight-knit clan was becoming less of an institution as it was replaced by more independent generations. ( )