Part of Palliser, book 1
First published 1975
Alice Vavasor faces an impossible choice between two suitors and two ways of life. She has broken her engagement to the reliable John Grey to reconnect with her dangerous cousin George, a man whose political ambitions mask his moral corruption. Alice asks herself what a woman should do with her life, but the answer seems to slip away with each decision. Her wealthy friend Lady Glencora Palliser wrestles with her own marital prison, trapped in a loveless marriage to the ambitious politician Plantagenet Palliser while yearning for her lost love Burgo Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, the widowed Mrs Greenow plays suitor against suitor with calculating charm. As parliamentary elections rage and fortunes rise and fall, these women navigate a society that offers them little agency over their own destinies. Trollope weaves together the public world of politics and the private sphere of marriage, showing how both trap and liberate in equal measure. At its heart, this is a story about the cost of choice and the weight of consequence in a world where women must choose between security and passion, duty and desire.
Genres: fiction, romance, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 19th-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, forced-proximity
Setting: England
Period: 19th-Century
847 pages · Paperback · Penguin Classics