Anthony Trollope: A Very Short Introduction

Anthony Trollope is among the best-loved novelists in the English language. His strongly drawn characters and skillful plots are compelling, while his moral judgements are often subtly challenging. He is an entertainer, but his power to make his readers think, and to feel, is unrivalled. This Very Short Introduction will place Trollope's work in the context of his life and times, drawing on recent scholarship to illuminate his central interests and literary strategies. The major series of novels (the six novels located in the fictional Barsetshire, and the six Palliser novels) are explored alongside the novels set in Ireland, his travel writing, and his less well-known fiction. Trollope's work is energized by the complexities of the Victorian Britain, with its political tensions, its troubled views of the relation between men and women, its expanding place in the wider world, and its growing discomfort with the contradictions created by a corrosive preoccupation with wealth and display. But Trollope's writing is of more than historical interest. His insight into the motives of human behavior and of the conflict between the need for reform and the wish to defend what might be destroyed by the pressure for change, feels surprisingly modern. Birch shows how his writing has retained its vivid appeal to new generations of readers.