Take a Trollope on holiday!
We have selected six of the best Trollope novels as suggested holiday reading. All six novels are available in paperback, published by Penguin Classics, so it couldn't be easier to take a Trollope on holiday.
Barchester Towers
Enjoy Trollope’s masterly depiction of the plotting and back-stabbing that 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.
Doctor Thorne
Trollope takes the reader into his confidence and captures the imagination by means of unforgettable scenes, a lively portrayal of character and a realistic representation of society. In Frank and Mary, Trollope has given us two of his most attractive characters and, in a story that satisfies both their personal desires and the materialistic aspirations of society, has created one of his happiest novels.
Can You Forgive Her?
Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. In asking his readers to pardon Alice for her transgression of the Victorian moral code, Trollope created a telling and wide-ranging account of the social world of his day.
Phineas Finn
The second of Trollope's Palliser novels tells of the career of a hot-blooded charming politician whose sexual energies bring him much success with women.
The Way We Live Now
The Way We Live Now, unpopular on its first appearance in 1874-5, is now widely recognized as Trollope's masterpiece. An unorthodox satire with a happy ending, it explores decadence and change in what Frank Kermode calls 'a world increasingly more congenial to the speculator than to the gentleman'.
Dr Wortle's School
Can it be right to persist in a bigamous marriage? Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the blackmailing brother of her American first husband appears at the school gates, their dreadful secret is revealed, and the county is scandalized.