Anthony Trollope: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

Anthony Trollope is among the best-loved novelists in the English language. His strongly drawn characters and skilful 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. Readers will find a focussed critical guide to his writing, that will direct and inform their reading. 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 examples of his less well-known fiction.

Trollope’s work is energised 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 behaviour (emotion, money, sex, and power), and of the conflict between the need for reform and the wish to defend what might be destroyed by the relentless pressure for change, feels surprisingly modern. Birch shows how his writing has retained its vivid appeal to new generations of readers.

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Dinah Birch, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool

Dinah Birch is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on Victorian literature, and on the work of John Ruskin. Her books include Ruskin’s Myths (1988) and Our Victorian Education (2008). She is the General Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009), and has published editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (2011), Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (2012) and The Small House at Allington (2014). She writes regularly for the TLS and the LRB, contributes to Sky Arts documentaries, and has served as a judge on the Booker Prize panel.