In the Library
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope, 1857
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 14 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 53
- Length
- Length 198k words
£1.99
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If you like this, try
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Austen's comedy of manners does the same thing, but through a marriage market instead of a cathedral close, with wit just as merciless and matchmaking just as consequential.
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
Middlemarch has its own clerical election, the vote on the hospital chaplaincy, and Eliot treats provincial manoeuvring with Trollope's amused, forgiving eye.
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Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's satire of social climbing does the same thing, but on a grander stage, following its scheming with the same relish Trollope brings to Mr. Slope's ambitions.
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About the book
Barchester has a new bishop, and no one in the cathedral close much cares about his sermons. What they care about is who actually runs the diocese: Dr. Proudie, mild and malleable, or his wife, who governs the diocese's clergy with the same iron hand she keeps on her own household, or Mr. Slope, the bishop's chaplain, whose handshake the narrator confesses he could never bear to feel twice. Anthony Trollope built an entire war out of seating plans, sermons, and who gets which parish, and made it one of the funniest fights in the English novel. Into the middle of it walks Eleanor Bold, a young widow with a fortune, hopelessly outnumbered by men who have already decided she is theirs. Trollope loved every one of these ridiculous, self-important people far too much to let a single one of them off easily. Nobody has ever made church committee politics feel this alive, or this dangerous to sit next to at dinner.