Duke's Children

Product Description A fitting conclusion to the Palliser novels, one of the most remarkable achievements in British fiction, The Duke's Children is a touching story of love, family relationships, loyalty, and principles, following the aging Duke of Omnium as he struggles to come to terms with the loss of his vivacious wife, Lady Glencora, and the willfulness of his three children. The wide-ranging introduction explores the implicit politics of the novel about the nature of conservatism and liberalism in all their facets; the "woman question"; autobiographical echoes; gambling; and the novel's interest in modernity and the United States. The book also includes an invaluable appendix that outlines the political context of the Palliser novels and establishes the internal chronology of the series, providing a unique understanding of the six books as a linked narrative. The editors also provide explanatory notes, and the preface provides both a compact biography of Anthony Trollope and a Chronology charts his life against the major historical events of the period. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. Review “Trollope is that rare thing: a strong writer with a trustworthy imagination . . . Yet, beyond saying that his writing feels like life, it’s hard to say just how he works his magic . . . Trollope, quite uncynically, understands both what’s necessary to make the world go round and which way the world ought to be made to turn . . . Politics and gossip are still the essential life of the world . . . and any writer who can turn them into art will survive.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker “ The Duke’s Children is a novel about sorrow and loss, and about a parent’s pained discovery that our children inevitably grow to love us less than we love them . . . The new version will most likely not change anyone’s view of The Duke’s Children, and yet all those tiny excisions do add up. The restored version is a fuller, richer book.” —Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review “Trollope has brought much pleasure. He can still make us laugh and many of his characters . . . still live, perhaps rivalled only among nineteenth-century novelists by some creations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens . . . Trollope denied that he had any mysterious genius, calling his achievement ‘comfortable but not splendid.’ This modesty, one feels, was genuine. It was also misplaced. The Duke’s Children shows an ability to go deep enough to see the anxiety and pain that can accompany death and change.” —from the Introduction by Max Egremont Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. from the Introduction by Max Egremont Anthony Trollope arouses strong feelings for a writer sometimes thought of as soothing. His admirers have been accused of smugness, middle-brow taste, nostalgia, catatonic escapism, intellectual laziness and fear of the avant garde. His fictional worlds have been described as very English, not always in praise, and his prose compared to hunks of roast beef. Thomas Carlyle, echoing many other intellectuals (for Trollope is not a novelist of ideas), thought him “irredeemably embedded in the commonplace, and grown fat upon it.” His critics are often ambivalent, giving but also taking away. Patronised by Henry James for writing too much and for blandness, Trollope had the American’s admiration for a “complete appreciation of the usual” and “extreme interest in character”. Virginia Woolf liked the “sober reality”, thought The Small House at Allington as perfect a novel as Pride and Prejudice yet decri