May 2014 Guest Editor Daisy Goodwin on The Palliser Series...
Dickens is the prose stylist, but Trollope is the psychologist. His characterisation is subtle and surprising and he is particularly good at creating convincing female characters. I love Lady Glencora in the Palliser series, she is the embodiment of what today we would call ‘soft power’. I have written two novels set in the nineteenth century and I read Trollope continually as a language barometer.
The first novel of Trollope's six-part Palliser series, also known as the Parliamentary Novels, "e;Can You Forgive Her?"e; revolves primarily around the young Alice Vavasor, a woman who cannot decide which of two men to marry. While the respectable gentleman John Grey seems the wiser choice, his lack of ambition pales to her virulent and aspiring cousin George. She alternately accepts and rejects each man, only increasing the confusion she feels concerning her emotions. Trollope's protagonist is most certainly breaching the moral code of the Victorian era, which he relates in a revealing description of the social sphere of his time. While Alice feels guilt for her indecision and wavering commitments, she is juxtaposed with the Lady Glencora, an affluent woman who sets her passion for a worthless man aside to marry the wealthy and successful politician Plantagenet Palliser. This character appears in every work of the series and provides a theme of English politics that binds the Parliamentary Novels together. This edition includes a biographical afterword.
Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, gender issues, and conflicts of his day. Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
