“The Freelands” is one of the cruelest, most ironic, and powerful novels by the great John Galsworthy. It is a story of great love—and a terrible scandal that shook all of Victorian England. The wife of a wealthy landowner dies, and without delay her younger sister takes her place in both the house and the master’s bed. The mistress raises the aristocrat’s children and lives with him “in sin,” refusing to enter into a legal marriage! The scandal rolls through high society everywhere, and catastrophe seems unavoidable and imminent…