Can You Forgive Her?

Published in 1864, CAN YOU FORGIVE HER? was the first volume in what turned out to be the Palliser sequence of six political novels, serialized on television some years ago. It is in this book that we first meet Plantagenet Palliser, later to become Duke of Omnium, but the forces of attention concerns two women and their lovers: Lady Glencora and Alice Vavasour. Trollope wonderfully contrasts their private dramas with the public excitements of politics in a book which has all the breadth and scope of the best nineteenth-century epics.