The Dark Flower, by John Galsworthy (1913), is the story of one man’s love-affairs. We first see the hero, Mark Lennan, when he is a student at Oxford. During the Easter holidays, he goes to the Tyrol with his tutor, Harold Stormer. There he falls in love with Stormer’s Austrian wife, Anna. When Mark is called home suddenly to attend the wedding of his sister in Derbyshire, he makes Anna promise that she and her husband will come to visit him before the Oxford term begins. When he goes, Anna gives him a clove pink, the “dark flower” of passion...
 
Eight years later Mark is in Rome. He is already a sculptor to be reckoned with. He is in love with Olive Cramier, a beautiful poetic creature yoked to an adoring but materialistic husband...
 
When we meet Lennan again, he is forty-six, married to the charming Sylvia, childless, and embarked upon another passion. This time he falls in love with a young girl, Nell Dromore, the natural daughter of an Oxford classmate...
 
GALSWORTHY, John. The Dark Flower. Montreal : Pierre Turcotte Editor, Collection Nobel Prize, 2022, 240 p.