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Anthony Trollope Message Board 1/1/2012
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Author Trollope's Book Reviews

Barchester Towers - Chronicles of Barsetshire 2
The second novel in Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire series, Barchester Towers is a direct sequel to The Warden. When the beloved old bishop of Barchester dies, everyone assumes his wealthy, worldly but respected, middle-aged son, Archdeacon Grantley, will take his place. However, the political party he supports loses power, and the appointment goes to a newcomer to the city, Bishop Proudie. He, his domineering wife and their chaplain, Oba...
Can You Forgive Her?
Can You Forgive Her? is the first novel in Anthony Trollope's Palliser series. Three women each have two very different suitors: one exciting but poor, the other financially secure but dull. The bulk of the novel focuses on 24-year-old Alice Vavasor (to whom the title refers). Alice, a relatively poor upper-class woman in Victorian England, breaks off her engagement to her cousin George because he is too wild and accepts a marriage proposal from John ...
Doctor Thorne
Dr. Thorne comes to Barsetshire with his niece Mary to open a practice. He befriends the local squire and Mary is educated with the squire's family. All goes well until the squire's son, Frank, falls in love with Mary, who has no fortune and is illegitimate as well. Frank, unfortunately must marry someone with money, so that he can keep up the family estates. The problem is solved when it is discovered that Mary is the child of Sir Roger Scatcherd...
Framley Parsonage - Chronicles of Barsetshire 4
Framley Parsonage is the fourth book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series by Anthony Trollope. Clergyman Mark Robarts benefits from his close friendship with Oxford classmate Lord Lufton. Lufton's mother bestows upon him the position of vicar of Framley Parsonage. Living among the upper class, but without their wealth, Robarts gets himself into financial difficulty, foolishly allowing himself to be talked into cosigning for a Mr. Sowerby's substant...

Trollope booklist

Lady Anna
Lady Anna's father was a dissolute nobleman who abandoned his wife and baby girl, leaving them in poverty. For years, their only friends were a tailor and his son, also a tailor. Lady Anna and the tailor's son are in love. But now her father dies abroad and there arises the question of his will. If Lady Anna inherits, she will be fabulously wealthy, marry into nobility (her mother hopes) and be accepted by the English aristocracy. The inheritance is...
Orley Farm
The book was written in the 1860s. Trollope was a contemporary of Dickens. Lady Mason is a widow living her twenty one year old son, Lucius. Twenty years earlier, she was tried, and aquitted, of forging her husband's will to gain some property for her infant son. She has lived a blameless highly respectable life ever since. Her neighbors and friends are Sir Peregrine Orme, a wealthy nobleman, and his widowed daughter in law, whose son is the same ...
Phineas Finn
Phineas Finn is the second novel in Anthony Trollope's Palliser series, following Can You Forgive Her? Phineas Finn is an amiable, very handsome and especially lucky man. Despite being the utterly dependent son of a moderately prosperous Irish doctor, extraordinarily favorable circumstances enable him to win election to the British Parliament (an accomplishment that eluded Trollope in real life). In London, he makes friends easily, and despite get...
Phineas Redux
Phineas Redux is a sequel to Phineas Finn; they are the fourth and second novels, respectively, in Anthony Trollope's Palliser series. When Phineas's wife dies, he becomes discontented with his life as a minor government functionary and longs to return to his exciting former career of politics in London. His luck is as strong as ever; his party is seeking to return to power with fresh blood, and with its support, he is once again elected to Parliament...
Rachel Ray
A young village girl grows up in a religious environment she finds oppressive and is forced to break up with her love under family pressure from her mother and sister, but ultimately love prevails over intolerance and close-minded suspicion. The protagonist, Rachel, is a young, middle-class woman of very limited means who lives in a village cottage with her widowed mother and her widowed sister, Dorothea. Rachel is young and spry, but her life is one of...
Ralph the Heir
This is a highly entertaining story about the ambitions of Ralph, heir to an estate, and the ambitions of the people around him, and how their lives intersect as they compete for the best marriages, run for election and get charged with corruption, and reveal the greed and hypocrisy of the British upper class. Ralph the Heir is an occasionally amusing, sometimes depressing, always sharp novel about social class and corruption in Victorian England. The es...

Anthony Trollope list of books

The American Senator
A puzzled and somewhat critical American senator visits England and chronicles the romantic problems of two young men and women of his acquaintance in a letter home to Boston. This is a feminist, funny, smart Victorian satire. It is narrated by US Senator Gotobed, who is a guest of a squire named John, a character in the love story in this novel. The story centers on two young ladies of good birth in the English countryside. Mary is a good girl, well-to-...
The Claverings
This is a story of social class and the consequences of your decisions set in Victorian England, in which a young man named Harry must become his own man and live by the choices he makes. This is another one of those endlessly interesting Victorian novels about - well about life, and the choices we make, and what we want versus what we get, and all those questions that occupy our thoughts to this day. I could read this book a dozen times and never get ti...
The Duke's Children
The Duke's Children is the sixth and final Palliser series novel by Anthony Trollope. The Duke of Omnium (Plantagenet Palliser) is utterly devastated by the sudden, unexpected death of his beloved wife, Lady Glencora. To add to his woes, two of their three young adult offspring are in trouble, which their distant (though loving) father is ill-equipped to deal with. The sole daughter, Lady Mary Palliser, has secretly gotten herself engaged to poor,...
The Eustace Diamonds
The Eustace Diamonds is the third novel in Anthony Trollope's Palliser series. Beautiful Lizzie Eustace (nee Greystock) has several major character flaws, among them being a nearly pathological liar. Left widowed (and wealthy) after the death of her soon-disillusioned husband, the overly romantic young woman considers several suitors after a period of insincere mourning: the dashing, if disreputable, Lord George de Bruce Carruthers; the meek and borin...
The Fixed Period
A Victorian imagining of a former British colony in 1980, this story is about the social and political implications of a mandatory euthanasia law for elderly citizens. This might be one of the rare Victorian science-fiction/dystopian novels. Set in the "future" (1980), it centers on a British colony island off the coast of New Zealand called Britannula, which is granted its independence some decades ago. (Little did Trollope know how accurate this partic...
The Last Chronicle of Barset
A priest is accused of theft, complicating the courtship of his daughter. The Last Chronicle of Barset is, as the title implies, the last of the six Barsetshire novels by Anthony Trollope. Poverty-stricken Reverend Josiah Crawley is believed to have cashed a cheque for a substantial amount that did not belong to him in order to pay a pressing debt. Crawley, an honest man, doesn't himself know the truth of the matter; the bill was indeed paid, but wher...

Anthony Trollope novels

The Prime Minister
The Prime Minister is the fifth novel in the Palliser series by Anthony Trollope. When neither the Whigs nor the Tories are strong enough to form a government, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, is called upon to form a coalition government. Palliser is at first unsure he is fit to be Prime Minister, but gradually becomes accustomed to it. To his frustration though, the coalition is too weak to actually accomplish much. Lady Glencora, his wife,...
The Warden
“The Warden” is the first novel in the Barsetshire series. The story revolves around the Reverend Septimus Harding who is the warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charity home for twelve elderly pensioners. Harding's younger daughter is in love with John Bold, a young doctor who begins a campaign against the hospital because he thinks it is a sinecure. Harding, a very sensitive man, begins to feel doubt about his position and then guilt. Eventually he re...