The very title Barchester Towers is evocative of everything Trollopian. It is the second of the six Barsetshire novels, and follows on directly from The Warden. In it, we are introduced to the ineffectual new Bishop of Barchester and his wife, the frightful Mrs Proudie, who is one of Trollope's most enduring characters. There is the bishop's chaplain, the oleaginous Obadiah Slope, the worldly Stanhope family, as well as friends from the earlier book, Septimus Harding, Eleanor Bold and the outrageous Archdeacon Grantly. Joanna Trollope introduces her forbear's masterpiece of intrigue, treachery, hypocrisy and ambition in which Anthony Trollope displays his command of comedy and ironic wit....

The novel is set against the background of the Reform Bill of 1867, and focuses on an Irish Member of the British House of Commons; in it Trollope explores the relations between the distinct elements of 'the United Kingdom'. Phineas has a personal chronicle which largely dominates the political calendar and it is noteworthy that Trollope wrote Phineas Finn at the same time as Gladstone's accession to power and the momentous consequences for Ireland that followed. Phineas Finn (1869) is the second of the Palliser novels, published between 1864 and 1880. As a group they provide us with the most extensive and telling exposé of British life during the period of its greatest prestige....

The book centers on the character of Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity, whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. Young John Bold turns his reforming zeal to exposing what he considers to be an abuse of privilege, despite being in love with Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor. The novel was highly topical as a case regarding the misapplication of church funds was the scandalous subject of contemporary debate. But Trollope uses this specific case to explore and illuminate the universal complexities of human motivation and social morality. This edition includes an introduction and notes by David Skilton and illustrations by Edward Ardizzone....

"It is the air which we breathe that fills our lungs and gives us life and light. It is that which refreshes us if pure, or sinks us into stagnation if it be foul. Let me for awhile inhale the breath of an invigorating literature. Sit down, Mr. Mackinnon; I have a question that I must put to you." And then she succeeded in carrying him off into a corner. As far as I could see he went willingly enough at that time....

Lizzie Eustace is young, beautiful, and widowed. Her determination to hold on to a fabulous necklace in the face of legal harassment by her brother-in-law's solicitor entangles her in a series of crimes - apparent and real - and contrived love-affairs. Her cousin, Frank Greystock, loyally assists her, much to the distress of his fiancée, Lucy Morris. A pompous Under-Secretary, a neurotic American society belle, a brutal knight, and a shady Scottish radical peer are only some of Trollope's engaging and revealing characters in this melange of detective story, political novel, and ironic romance. The Eustace Diamonds (1873) is the third in the Palliser series. Though often considered the least political of the six, it is a highly revealing study of Victoran Britain, its colonial activities in Ireland, India, and Australia, and its veneration of wealth....

The fourth novel in Trollope's Palliser series, Phineas Redux stands on its own as a compelling work of political intrigue, personal crisis, and romantic jealousy. Phineas Finn lives quietly in Dublin, resigned to the fact that his political career is over and coming to terms with the death of his wife. He receives an unexpected invitation to return to Parliament, and jumps at the chance, whereupon old romances and rivalries are revived. When his adversary, Mr. Bonteen, is murdered, suspicion immediately falls on Finn, and his former friends and lovers seem only to add to his shame....

'No-one probably, ever felt himself to be more alone in the world than our old friend, the Duke of Omnium, when the Duchess died.' Her death leaves to the Duke the care of his three wilful children and to the children the continuing social education of their father. The eldest, Lord Silverbridge, has been sent down from Oxford; Lord Gerald Palliser is doing indifferently well at Cambridge; and Lady Mary Palliser, the only daughter, is set on what seems to her father an unsuitable marriage. While the Duke must learn to accept that 'nothing will ever be quite what it used to be', his heir must acquire, his father hopes, a respect for justice, self-sacrifice, and honour, and a suitable wife. The rival claims of Lady Mabel Grex and Isabel Boncassen, the American granddaughter of a dock-worker, are emblematic of the claims on the Palliser family: tradition against progress, duty against natural feelings. The Duke's Children is the sixth and last of the Palliser novels (1864-80), which together provide an exceptionally rich exposé of the British way of life during its most prestigious period....

The first of Trollope’s popular Barsetshire novels, set in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester, The Warden centers on the honorable cleric Septimus Harding, one of Trollope’s most memorable characters. When Harding is accused of mismanaging church funds, his predicament lays bare the complexities of the Victorian world and of nineteenth-century provincial life. And, as Louis Auchincloss observes in his Introduction, “The theme of The Warden presents the kind of social problem that always fascinated Trollope: the inevitable clash of ancient privilege with modern social awareness.”...

Cousin Henry, first published in 1879, is perhaps the most unusual and intriguing of Trollope's shorter novels. Trollope's masterly handling of the novel's unlikely hero, a tiresome and timid coward, is notable for its insight and compassion....

After the death of old Dr. Grantly, a bitter struggle begins over who will succeed him as Bishop of Barchester. And when the decision is finally made to appoint the evangelical Dr. Proudie, rather than the son of the old bishop, Archdeacon Grantly, resentment and suspicion threaten to cause deep divisions within the diocese. Trollope's masterly depiction of the plotting and back-stabbing that ensues lies at the heart of one of the most vivid and comic of his Barsetshire novels, peopled by such very different figures as the saintly Warden of Hiram's Hospital, Septimus Harding, the ineffectual but well-meaning new bishop and his terrifying wife, and the oily chaplain Mr. Slope who has designs on Mr. Harding's daughter....

Widely regarded as one of Trollope's most successful later novels, He Knew He Was Right is a study of marriage and of sexual relationships cast against a background of agitation for women's rights....

When it appeared in 1874, Lady Anna met with little success, and positively outraged the conservative - `This is the sort of thing the reading public will never stand...a man must be embittered by some violent present exasperation who can like such disruptions of social order as this.' (Saturday Review) - although Trollope himself considered it `the best novel I ever wrote! Very much! Quite far away above all others!!!' This tightly constructed and passionate study of enforced marriage in the world of Radical politics and social inequality, records the lifelong attempt of Countess Lovel to justify her claim to her title, and her daughter Anna's legitimacy, after her husband announces that he already has a wife. However, mother and daughter are driven apart when Anna defies her mother's wish that she marry her cousin, heir to her father's title, and falls in love with journeyman tailor and young Radical Daniel Thwaite. The outcome is never in doubt, but Trollope's ambivalence on the question is profound, and the novel both intense and powerful....

Anthony Trollope is most famous for his portrait of the professional and landed classes of Victorian England, especially in his Palliser and Barsetshire novels. But he was also the author of one of the most fascinating autobiographies of the nineteenth century. Trollope was born in 1815, the son of a formidable mother and a tragically unsuccessful father. Poor, ill-dressed, awkward, and sullen, he was the victim of vicious bullying at Harrow and Winchester. But he managed later to carve out a successful career in the General Post Office while devoting every spare moment (except in hunting season) to writing. How he paid his groom to wake him every morning at 5.30 a.m. and disciplined himself to write 250 words every quarter of an hour has become part of literary legend. His efforts resulted in over sixty books, fortune, and fame, and in An Autobiography Trollope looks back on his life with some satisfaction. The facts he reveals and the opinions he records - about Dickens and George Eliot, politics and the civil service - are as revealing as the judgments he passes on his own character....

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At first savagely reviewed, The Way We Live Now (1875) has since emerged as Trollope's masterpiece and the most admired of his works. When Trollope returned to England from the colonies in 1872 he was horrified by the immorality and dishonesty he found. In a fever of indignation he sat down to write The Way We Live Now, his longest novel. Nothing escaped the satirist's whip: politics, finance, the aristocracy, the literary world, gambling, sex, and much else. In this world of bribes and vendettas, swindling and suicide, in which heiresses are won like gambling stakes, Trollope's characters embody all the vices: Lady Carbury, a 43-year-old coquette, 'false from head to foot'; her son Felix, with the 'instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog'; and Melmotte, the colossal figure who dominates the book, a 'horrid, big, rich scoundrel ... a bloated swindler ... a vile city ruffian'....

Barchester Towers, Trollope's most popular novel, is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire. The Chronicles follow the intrigues of ambition and love in the cathedral town of Barchester. Trollope was of course interested in the Church, that pillar of Victorian society - in its susceptibility to corruption, hypocrisy, and blinkered conservatism - but the Barsetshire novels are no more `ecclesiastical' than his Palliser novels are `political'. It is the behavior of the individuals within a power structure that interests him. In this novel Trollope continues the story of Mr. Harding and his daughter Eleanor, adding to his cast of characters that oily symbol of progress Mr. Slope, the hen-pecked Dr. Proudie, and the amiable and breezy Stanhope family. The central questions of this moral comedy - Who will be warden? Who will be dean? Who will marry Eleanor? - are skillfully handled with that subtlety of ironic observation that has won Trollope such a wide and appreciative readership....

Engaged to the ambitious and self-serving Adolphus Crosbie, Lily Dale is devastated when he jilts her for the aristocratic Lady Alexandrina. Although crushed by his faithlessness, Lily still believes she is bound to her unworthy former fiance for life and therefore condemned to remain single after his betrayal. And when a more deserving suitor pays his addresses, she is unable to see past her feelings for Crosbie. Written when Trollope was at the height of his popularity, The Small House at Allington (1864) contains his most admired heroine in Lily Dale a young woman of independent spirit who nonetheless longs to be loved and is a moving dramatization of the ways in which personal dilemmas are affected by social pressures....

The third novel in Trollope’s Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds bears all the hallmarks of his later works, blending dark cynicism with humor and a keen perception of human nature. Following the death of her husband, Sir Florian, beautiful Lizzie Eustace mysteriously comes into possession of a hugely expensive diamond necklace. She maintains it was a gift from her husband, but the Eustace lawyers insist she give it up, and while her cousin Frank takes her side, her new lover, Lord Fawn, declares that he will only marry her if the necklace is surrendered. As gossip and scandal intensify, Lizzie’s truthfulness is thrown into doubt, and, in her desire to keep the jewels, she is driven to increasingly desperate acts....

'Trollope did not write for posterity,' observed Henry James. 'He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket.' Considered by contemporary critics to be Trollope's greatest novel, The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of London in the 1870s and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. 'I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age,' Trollope said.

His story concerns Augustus Melmotte, a French swindler and scoundrel, and his daughter, to whom Felix Carbury, adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury, is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope knew well the difficulties of dealing with editors, publishers, reviewers, and the public; his portrait of Lady Carbury, impetuous, unprincipled, and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion, is one of his finest satirical achievements.

His picture of late-nineteenth-century England is a portrait of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy. In The Way We Live Now Trollope combines his talents as a portraitist and his skills as a storyteller to give us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago. ...

Augustus Melmotte is a fraudulent foreign financier who preys on dissolute nobility - using charm to tempt the weak into making foolish investments in his dubious schemes. Persuaded to put money into a notional plot to run a railroad from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, the capricious gambler Felix Carbury soon becomes one of his victims. But as Melmotte climbs higher in society, his web of deceit - which also draws in characters as diverse as his own daughter Marie and Felix's mother, the pulp novelist Lady Carbury - begins to unravel. A radical exploration of the dangers associated with speculative capitalism, this is a fascinating satire about a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy....

Engaged to the ambitious and self-serving Adolphus Crosbie, Lily Dale is devastated when he jilts her for the aristocratic Lady Alexandrina. Although crushed by his faithlessness, Lily still believes she is bound to her unworthy former fiance for life and therefore condemned to remain single after his betrayal. And when a more deserving suitor pays his addresses, she is unable to see past her feelings for Crosbie. Written when Trollope was at the height of his popularity, The Small House at Allington (1864) contains his most admired heroine in Lily Dale a young woman of independent spirit who nonetheless longs to be loved and is a moving dramatization of the ways in which personal dilemmas are affected by social pressures....

Reports from the West Indies, North America, Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa by the quintessential Victorian voyager, an adventurous and energetic sightseer with a fine sense of humor and irony....

Trollope's novel of betrayal and retribution centres on the Neville family: in particular Fred Neville, the heir. Fred is stationed with the army in Ireland and, despite his uncle's wish that he should marry Sophia Mellerby, falls in love with Kate O'Hara, a young Catholic girl....