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DOCTOR THORNE

ANTHONY TROLLOPE was born in london in 1815 and died in 1882. his father was a barrister who went bankrupt, and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who resourcefully in later life became a bestselling writer. He received little education and his childhood generally seems to have been an unhappy one.

Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime, publishing over forty novels and many short stories, at the same time following a notable career as a senior civil servant in the Post Office. The Warden (1855), the first of his novels to achieve success, was succeeded by the sequence of ’Barsetshire’ novels, Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). This series, regarded by some as Trollope’s masterpiece, demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English novels – property – and features a gallery of recurring characters, including, among others, Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. Almost equally popular were the six brilliant Palliser novels comprising Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876) and The Duke’s Children (1880).

Trollope has been acclaimed as a supreme portraitist of the professional and landed classes of mid-Victorian England. His early novels depict, with irony and wit, the comfortable world of the English gentry, contrasting the apparent stability of rural life with the harsh, disturbing rhythms of London. In his later work Trollope’s rural order has given way to the values of industrial society, and his tone is generally gloomier and more pessimistic.

RUTH RENDELL, novelist and crime writer, has written more than forty books both in her own name and under her pseudonym, barbara Vine. Apart from fiction, she is the author of Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk and has edited and introduced a selection of the short stories of the Victorian ghost-story writer and antiquarian M. R. James under the tide A Warning to the Curious. She regularly reviews books for the Daily Telegraph. Ruth Rendell holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE Doctor Thorne

with an Introduction and Notes by

RUTH RENDELL

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