In the Library
Doctor Thorne
Anthony Trollope, 1858
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 47
- Length
- Length 216k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I quite feel that an apology is due for beginning a novel with two long dull chapters full of description.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope
Trollope's cathedral close does the same thing, but the war is fought over a bishopric rather than a mortgage, and the weapons are sermons and seating plans.
£1.99
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Austen's heir is also pressed to marry well, and a grand lady also bullies the penniless girl he loves, the same comedy of pedigree against merit that Trollope learned from her.
£1.99
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot's Lydgate is the new doctor in a provincial town where money, marriage and gossip decide everything, the country practice of Doctor Thorne seen with a graver, wider eye.
£1.99
About the book
Greshamsbury is mortgaged to the last acre, and everyone in the house has done the arithmetic: the heir must marry money or the family goes under. What he wants instead is the doctor's niece, a girl with no fortune and a birth the county would never forgive if it knew of it. Anthony Trollope opens by apologising for two dull chapters of description, a joke that tells you at once how safe you are in his hands. Then he watches these people be snobbish, frightened, grasping and loving, and refuses to despise any of them, not the countess counting heiresses, not the drunken self-made baronet dying by degrees of his own brandy. The doctor knows precisely who his niece is and says nothing, and the cost of that silence is the whole book. Few novels are this clear-eyed about what money does to a family and this unembarrassed about wanting the love to win.