![]() ![]() But Trollope had one advantage over Dickens: his characters might not be as lovable, irascible, memorable, or larger-than-life as Dickens's, but they were more real.Ĭan You Forgive Her? is the first book in Trollope's Palliser series, and it runs to about 900 pages. 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.īetween Dickens and Trollope, my preference is for Dickens, who I think had a better command and love of the language, and a much sharper pen. She is increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation-a situation contrasted with that of her friend Lady Glencora, forced by “sagacious heads” to marry the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser in order to prevent her true love, the worthless Burgo Fitzgerald, from wasting her vast fortune. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe.Īlice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey-and so finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. Available for free at Project Gutenberg.Ĭan You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Published 1864, Approximately 317,000 words. Boy could Trollope write, and I'm talking about volume. ![]()
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