Can You Forgive Her? (122 page)

1875
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone
Travels to Australia, via Brindisi, Suez and Ceylon
Begins writing,
An Autobiography
on his return.
The Prime
Minister
(—1876)

1876 Mark Twain,
Tom Sawyer
Finishes writing
An American Senator
(—1877)

1877 Henry James,
The American
Visits South Africa
Is He Popenjoy?
(—1878)

1878 Hardy,
The Return of the Native
Sails to Iceland
John Caldigate
(—1879),
The Lady of Launay, An Eye for an Eye
(—1879) and
South Africa

1879 George Meredith,
The Egoist
Cousin Henry, The Duke’s Children
(—1880) and
Thackeray

1880 Greenwich Mean Time made the legal standard in Britain.
First Anglo-Boer War (—1881)
Benjamin Disraeli,
Endymion
Settles in South Harting, W. Sussex
Dr Wortle’s School
and
The Life of Cicero

1881 In Ireland, Parnell is arrested for conspiracy
and the Land
League is outlawed
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Treasure Island
(—1882)
Ayala’s Angel, The Fixed Period
(—1882) and
Marion Fay
(—1882)

1882 Phoenix Park murders in Dublin
Visits Ireland twice to research a new Irish novel, and
returns to spend the winter in London. Dies on 6
December
Kept in the Dark, Mr Scarborough’s Family
(—1883) and
The
Landleaguers
(—1883, unfinished)

1883
An Autobiography
is published under the supervision of
Trollope’s son Henry

1884
An Old Man’s Love

1923
The Noble Jilt

1927
London Tradesmen
(reprinted from the
Pall Mall Gazette,
1880)

1972
The New Zealander

Trollope’s
An Autobiography,
published in 1883, a year after his death, is essential for an understanding of his life and work. Michael Sadleir’s classic
Trollope: A Commentary
(1927) has been supplemented by comprehensive biographies from R. H. Super,
The Chronicler of Barsetshire
(1988), Richard Mullen,
Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World
(1990), N. John Hall,
Anthony
Trollope: A Biography
(1991) and Victoria Glendinning,
Trollope
(1992). N. John Hall has edited Trollope’s
Letters
(2 vols., 1993); Richard Mullen is the author, with James Munson, of
The Penguin Companion to Trollope
(1996). No complete edition of all Trollope’s forty-seven novels is generally available, but both the Barchester and the Palliser series, as well as a number of other titles, have
appeared in Penguin Classics and in Oxford’s World’s Classics. Michael Sadleir’s bibliography of the novels as they were first published appeared in 1927, and he edited the ‘source’ of
Can You Forgive Her?
for a limited edition in 1923. N. John Hall’s
Trollope and His Illustrators
(1980) discusses and reprints the original illustrations for
Can You Forgive Her?

An absorbing collection of nineteenth-century
periodical criticism can be found in Donald Smalley’s
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
(1969), which includes Henry James’s fierce 1865 review of
Can You Forgive Her?
His more generous obituary essay of 1883, reprinted in
Partial Portraits
(1888), is collected in the Library of America’s volume of James’s writings on American and English writers, edited by Leon Edel (1984). David Skilton’s
Anthony
Trollope and His Contemporaries
(1972) relates Trollope’s novels to the conventions of mid-Victorian fiction.

Critical studies which consider
Can You Forgive Her?
as part of the Palliser series or in the course of larger arguments about Trollope’s fiction include: A. O. J. Cockshut,
Anthony Trollope
(1955); Robert M. Polhemus,
The Changing World of Anthony Trollope
(1968); John Halperin,
Trollope
and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers
and Others
(1977); James R. Kincaid,
The Novels of Anthony Trollope
(1977); R. C. Terry,
Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding
(1977); P. D. Edwards,
Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope
(1978); Arthur Pollard,
Anthony Trollope
(1978); Robert Tracy,
Trollope’s Later Novels
(1978); Juliet McMaster,
Trollope’s Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern
(1979); Walter
M. Kendrick,
The Novel-Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope
(1980); Shirley Robin Letwin,
The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct
(1982); Bill Overton,
The Unofficial Trollope
(1982); Andrew Wright,
Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art
(1983); Mary Hamer,
Writing by Numbers: Trollope’s Serial Fiction
(1987); Stephen Wall,
Trollope and Character
(1988).

Relevant articles
include: George Levine: ‘Can You Forgive Him? Trollope’s
Can You Forgive Her?
and the Myth of Realism’,
Victorian Studies,
18 (1974); A. O. J. Cockshut, ‘Trollope’s Liberalism’, in
Anthony Trollope,
ed. Tony Bareham (1980); J. L. Chevalier, ‘Women and Prudence in the Palliser Novels’,
Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens,
31 (1990); Randall Craig, ‘Rhetoric and Courtship in
Can You Forgive Her?’,
Journal of English Literary History,
62 (1995).

*
Ah, my friend
¹
, from whom I have borrowed this scion of the nobility! Had he been left with us he would have forgiven me my little theft, and now that he has gone I will not change the name.