The Island Pharisees

The first novel Galsworthy published under his own name, The Island Pharisees (1904) takes a critical look beneath the gilded veneer of Edwardian England. Dick Shelton is engaged to Antonia Dennant and his privileged middle-class life seems complete until he meets Ferrand, an enigmatic young vagrant, who begins to shake his complacency and open his eyes to the selfishness and hypocrisy of London society. When Shelton escapes the city and travels to his fiancee's home in rural Oxfordshire, he hopes to share an Eden with his 'inscrutable young Eve.' But even here the Dennants' narrow, bourgeois world is bound by convention - and the shadow of Ferrand is never very far away...