Philip Pirrip –or ‘Pip’ – has ‘great expectations’. An orphan, brought up in a small village on the Essex marshes by his sharp-tongued sister and her husband Joe Gargery, the gentle...

Born and raised in the workhouse, orphan Oliver Twist’s life is miserable. When he is taken on as an apprentice by Mr Sowerby the undertaker, he hopes things will get better, but Sowerby’s...

Molly Gibson lost her mother when she was a child. She is very close to her father and imagines that he will stay a widower all his days, but he marries again.

A stepmother – any...

In ‘Phineas Finn’, the second of the ‘Palliser’ novels, Trollope balances the rival demands of public and private life, entangling political ambitions with the experiences of love.

'The Last Chronicle of Barset' is the final and darkest of the Barsetshire novels.

It conducts us once again into the world of the Cathedral Close, the deanery and the lawyers’...

Philip Pirrip –or ‘Pip’ – has ‘great expectations’. An orphan, brought up in a small village on the Essex marshes by his sharp-tongued sister and her husband Joe Gargery, the gentle...

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’.

With these words Jane Austen’s best-loved novel opens,...

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her...

Paul Manning is working away from home as the assistant to Mr Holdsworth, a managing railroad engineer. He makes contact with his distant relatives, the Holmans, who live nearby and welcome him...

‘The Mill on the Floss’ tells the tale of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, the children of the obstinate miller of Dorlcote Mill. Maggie, intense and sensitive, dearly loves her more prosaic brother,...

Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief.Struggling to adapt to life without his beloved Lady Glencora, he works hard to...

To Paul Dombey, business and money are everything. He runs his family as he runs his firm: coldly, calculatingly and commercially. The only person he cares for is his little son, while his...

Hungry Hill is a passionate story of five generations of an Irish family and the copper mine on Hungry Hill with which their fortunes and fate were so closely bound, told with all the magic that...

Set in the rural midlands of England, 'The Rainbow' revolves around three generations of Brangwens, a family deeply involved with the land and noted for their strength and vigour. When Tom...

Barchester Towers', Trollope's most popular novel, is the second of the six 'Chronicles of Barsetshire'. Trollope continues the story, begun in 'The Warden', of Mr Harding and his daughter Eleanor.