Four Freeland brothers — a squire, a bureaucrat, a banker and a Tolstoyan — quarrel over England while farm laborers are evicted from their cottages and a girl of their own family takes the laborers' side. Galsworthy wrote it in 1915, at the height of his fame and his doubts; the land question is real, the family is his own class, and nobody comes out well. Fifty-eight plates of painting from 1840 to 1926, including work by William Orpen and Spencer Gore, extend the novel's portrait of a country dividing against itself.
