Anthony Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now to study what he termed “the commercial profligacy of the age,” and he succeeded in publishing the most savage attack on human nature since William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848). He viewed… Read More ›
Frances Trollope wrote many novels, but most critics agree The Vicar of Wrexhill is her best. Framed in her normally intrusive, authorial didactic voice, the novel focuses on corruption in the Church of England. Her combined themes of religious and… Read More ›
George Meredith based his novel The Tragic Comedians on an account of a love affair that became famous in social circles of his day. In the opinion of later critics, his use of the true account stifled the ingenuity apparent… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott has long been acknowledged as the first writer of historical fiction, and when he chose Scotland as a setting, he generally produced his best work. He introduced this approach in his first novel, Waverley (1814), when he… Read More ›
The Prime Minister took its place as Anthony Trollope’s fifth book in the Palliser sequence. It first appeared as a serial between November 1875 and June 1876, before its issue in four volumes. While many of Trollope’s contemporaries, including Henry… Read More ›
Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady appeared first as installments in The Atlantic Monthly (1880–81), where readers recognized in its protagonist, Isabel Archer, a more mature version of the title character from his earlier novella, Daisy Miller (1879). Like… Read More ›
Published like Charles Dickens’s other works, first as a serial from May 1864 through November 1865, Our Mutual Friend reflects the author’s traditional multiple plots. It would be Dickens’s final completed work, and some critics see it as the culmination… Read More ›
The most tragic novel by George Eliot, this story is also her most autobiographical. It was published after her highly successful first novel, Adam Bede (1859), and it proved to be another great success, helping to establish Eliot’s reputation as… Read More ›
Charles Dickens first published his sixth novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, as a 10-part serial between January 1843 and July 1844. He later stated that he thought the lengthy tale of a young man’s emotional and ethical maturation the “best” of his… Read More ›
Jane Austen began writing Mansfield Park in 1811 but did not publish it until 1814. With this, the penultimate novel published during her lifetime, she focused on financially comfortable small communities of individuals, raising the quotidian to a level of… Read More ›
When George Meredith wrote Lord Ormont and His Aminta, he focused on a theme he would use again: incompatibility in marriage. Many critics considered it a slight work; some felt Meredith wrote it during a break after the far more… Read More ›
Anthony Trollope first began work on He Knew He Was Right at the end of 1867, following in that same year the publication of The Last Chronicle of Barset, the final entry in the series that had won him fame… Read More ›
Upon beginning Charles Reade’s sequel to his novel Love Me Little, Love Me Long (1850), a reader might believe the book is purely romance. Mrs. Dodd and her children, Edward and Julia, keep one another company in the absence of… Read More ›
First published in The Cornhill Magazine from January 1860 through April 1861, Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage was the fourth in his Barsetshire novels sequence. That sequence had opened in 1855 with The Warden and would conclude with The Last Chronicle… Read More ›
When Robert Buchanan wrote Foxglove Manor, he had experienced years of poverty, worsened by the illness of his wife. Her death in 1881 followed the failure of his journal, Light, leaving him penniless and desperate for funds. In order to… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, became his first commercially successful venture, allowing him to leave his vocation of architecture and write full time. First published as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine from January through December… Read More ›
George Moore’s novel Esther Waters proved his most successful work. The novel’s realistic portrayal of the hardships of a servant girl departed from the oversentimentality by which much Victorian fiction, and some of Moore’s earlier works, were marked. According to… Read More ›
Charles Dickens’s seventh novel, first published in 20 serial parts between October 1846 and April 1848 with the complete title Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Retail, Wholesale, and for Exploration, marked what many critics agree to be… Read More ›
Like her first novel, Self Control (1810), Mary Brunton’s second novel, Discipline, remains most important for its contribution to the development of silver-fork fiction and the manners novel, later made most famous by Jane Austen. Didactic in nature, the novel… Read More ›
One of Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-known novels, Cranford, focuses on an English community of mature women, to which men seldom gain admittance. It first appeared in series form (1851–53) in Charles Dickens’s periodical Household Words and was meant only as a… Read More ›
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