Navy calf spine (faded to brown) with gilt banding and title. All edges marbled. Dimensions are for one volume.

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First edition. 40 wood-engraved plates, those in vol. I by Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”) and those in vol. II by Miss Taylor. [viii], 320; vi, [ii], 320 pp., with half-titles. 2 vols. 8vo. A lovely edition nicely bound as per photograph in original covers

Can You Forgive Her? is a novel by Anthony Trollope, first published in serial form in 1864 and 1865. It is the first of six novels in the Palliser series, also known as the Parliamentary Novels.The novel follows three parallel stories of courtship and marriage and the decisions of three women: Alice Vavasor, her cousin Glencora Palliser, and her aunt Arabella Greenow. Early on, Alice asks the question “What should a woman do with her life?” This theme repeats itself in the dilemmas faced by the other women in the novel. Lady Glencora and her husband Plantagenet Palliser recur in the remainder of the series.

Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was an English novelist and civil servant of the Victorian era. Among his best-known works is a series of novels collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which revolves around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote novels on political, social, and gender issues, and other topical matters.

Trollope’s literary reputation dipped during the last years of his life,but he regained somewhat of a following by the mid-20th century. Trollope’s first major success came with The Warden (1855)—the first of six novels set in the fictional county of “Barsetshire” (often collectively referred to as the Chronicles of Barsetshire), dealing primarily with the clergy and landed gentry. Barchester Towers (1857) has probably become the best-known of these. Trollope’s other major series, the Palliser novels, which overlap with the Barsetshire novels, concerned itself with politics, with the wealthy, industrious Plantagenet Palliser (later Duke of Omnium) and his delightfully spontaneous, even richer wife Lady Glencora featured prominently. However, as with the Barsetshire series, many other well-developed characters populated each novel and in one, The Eustace Diamonds, the Pallisers play only a small role.

Trollope’s popularity and critical success diminished in his later years, but he continued to write prolifically, and some of his later novels have acquired a good reputation. In particular, critics, who concur that the book was not popular when published, generally acknowledge the sweeping satire The Way We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece. In all, Trollope wrote 47 novels, 42 short stories, and five travel books, as well as nonfiction books titled Thackeray (1879) and Lord Palmerston (1882).

After his death, Trollope’s An Autobiography appeared and was a bestseller in London. Trollope’s downfall in the eyes of the critics stemmed largely from this volume. Even during his writing career, reviewers tended increasingly to shake their heads over his prodigious output, but when Trollope revealed that he strictly adhered to a daily writing quota, and admitted that he wrote for money, he confirmed his critics’ worst fears. Writers were expected to wait for inspiration, not to follow a schedule.

Julian Hawthorne, an American writer, critic and friend of Trollope, while praising him as a man, calling him “a credit to England and to human nature, and … [deserving] to be numbered among the darlings of mankind”, also said that “he has done great harm to English fictitious literature by his novels”.

Henry James also expressed mixed opinions of Trollope. The young James wrote some scathing reviews of Trollope’s novels (The Belton Estate, for instance, he called “a stupid book, without a single thought or idea in it … a sort of mental pabulum”). He also made it clear that he disliked Trollope’s narrative method; Trollope’s cheerful interpolations into his novels about how his storylines could take any twist their author wanted did not appeal to James’s sense of artistic integrity. However, James thoroughly appreciated Trollope’s attention to realistic detail, as he wrote in an essay shortly after the novelist’s death:

‘His [Trollope’s] great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual. … [H]e felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings. … Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent, of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself. … A race is fortunate when it has a good deal of the sort of imagination—of imaginative feeling—that had fallen to the share of Anthony Trollope; and in this possession our English race is not poor.’

Writers such as William Thackeray, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins admired and befriended Trollope, and Eliot noted that she could not have embarked on so ambitious a project as Middlemarch without the precedent set by Trollope in his own novels of the fictional—yet thoroughly alive—county of Barsetshire. Other contemporaries of Trollope praised his understanding of the quotidian world of institutions, official life, and daily business; he is one of the few novelists who find the office a creative environment. W. H. Auden wrote of Trollope: “Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him, even Balzac is too romantic.”

As trends in the world of the novel moved increasingly towards subjectivity and artistic experimentation, Trollope’s standing with critics suffered. But Lord David Cecil noted in 1934 that “Trollope is still very much alive … and among fastidious readers.” He noted that Trollope was “conspicuously free from the most characteristic Victorian faults”. In the 1940s, Trollopians made further attempts to resurrect his reputation; he enjoyed a critical renaissance in the 1960s, and again in the 1990s. Some critics today have a particular interest in Trollope’s portrayal of women—he caused remark even in his own day for his deep insight and sensitivity to the inner conflicts caused by the position of women in Victorian society.

In the early 1990s, interest in Trollope increased. A Trollope Society flourishes in the United Kingdom, as does its sister society in the United States. In 2011, the University of Kansas’s Department of English, in collaboration with the Hall Center for the Humanities and in partnership with The Fortnightly Review, began awarding an annual Trollope Prize. The Prize was established to focus attention on Trollope’s work and career.

Notable fans have included Alec Guinness, who never travelled without a Trollope novel; the former British prime ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major; the first Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald; the economist John Kenneth Galbraith; the merchant banker Siegmund Warburg, who said that “reading Anthony Trollope surpassed a university education”; the English judge Lord Denning; the American novelists Sue Grafton, Dominick Dunne, and Timothy Hallinan; the poet Edward Fitzgerald; the artist Edward Gorey, who kept a complete set of his books; the American author Robert Caro; the playwright David Mamet; the soap opera writer Harding Lemay; the screenwriter and novelist Julian Fellowes; liberal political philosopher Anthony de Jasay; and theologian Stanley Hauerwas.