Anthony Trollope | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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the Irish novels of, [59] 38; the Barsetshire novels, [73] 7; the Palliser Novels, [77] 49

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Political Life

Daisy Hay on Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels

In Slightly Foxed no. 73 I wrote about the solace I found, during the first year of the pandemic, in listening to Timothy West’s brilliant recordings of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels. I couldn’t bear to stop listening when I reached the end of The Last Chronicle of Barset, so I followed Plantagenet Palliser and the Duke of Omnium out of Barsetshire and into the books in which they take up starring roles. Originally labelled collectively as Trollope’s ‘parliamentary novels’, today this series is more commonly known as ‘the Palliser novels’ after the family whose domestic and political fortunes form its connecting thread.

A Year in Barsetshire

Daisy Hay on Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels

In the spring of 2020, amidst the early devastation of Covid-19, I found myself unable to read. I was grappling with the after-effects of an accident when the pandemic struck, so my concentration was already fractured by the time the streets fell silent. Deprived of the consolations of print, one April afternoon I pressed play on the first chapter of the audiobook of Anthony Trollope’s The Warden as I left the house for my daily walk. I did so without much expectation that the noise would do anything other than provide a mild distraction from the exigencies of the day, but within minutes the cathedral close of Barchester had opened up before me and I was hooked. What follows is an account of the year I spent among the inhabitants of Barsetshire, and of the solace I found in the connected stories of the Barchester novels.

Trollope’s Ireland

Margaret Drabble on the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope

I have been reading Trollope’s fiction over several decades, but it was not until this year that I embarked upon his three principal Irish novels. They have not been his most popular works, and I, like many others, was deterred by the heavy use of dialect which slows the reader down and makes the page look unwelcoming. But when I decided to overcome this prejudice, I was rewarded.

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