Doctor Thorne: A Barsetshire Novel

Anthony Trollope was a Victorian-era English author best known for his satirical novel The Way We Live Now, a criticism of the greed and immorality he witnessed living in London. Trollope was employed as a postal surveyor in Ireland when he began to take up writing as a serious pursuit, publishing four novels on Irish subjects during his years there. In 1851 Trollope was travelling the English countryside for work when was inspired with the plot for The Warden, the first of six novels in what would become his famous The Chronicles of Barsetshire series. Trollope eventually settled in London and over the next thirty years published a prodigious body of work, including Barsetshire novels such as Barchester Towers and Doctor Thorne, as well as numerous other novels and short stories. Trollope died in London 1882 at the age of 67.

Joanna Trollope is the bestselling author of eighteen novels, most recently a contemporary reimagining of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, as well as The Soldier's Wife, Daughters-in-Law and Friday Nights. She has been writing fiction for more than thirty years; her works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and several have been adapted for television. She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 1996 for her services to literature, and she lives in London and Gloucestershire.

With an Introduction by Joanna Trollope.

Trollope's delightful novel recounts the fortunes of Doctor Thorne, an upright and principled country doctor, and his niece Mary. She falls in love with Frank Gresham, heir to the heavily mortgaged Greshambury estate, but he is constrained in his choices by the need to marry well so that he can restore the family fortunes.

The vicissitudes of Mary and Frank's courtship are lovingly detailed with all the wit and satire that show Trollope at his finest. In this social comedy, full of snobbery, hypocrisy and self-seeking, we meet characters from the city and cathedral of Barchester, and are introduced to the grandiloquent de Courcy family, whose pretensions mark its members among the author's most felicitous creations, as well as the down-to-earth heiress Miss Dunstable and the deplorable Sir Roger Scatcherd.