Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17741 in Books
• Published on: 1974-06-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 848 pages

Synopsis
Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. Increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation, her situation is contrasted with that of her friend Lady Glencora - forced to marry the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser in order to prevent the worthless Burgo Fitzgerald from wasting her vast fortune. In asking his readers to pardon Alice for her transgression of the Victorian moral code, Trollope created a telling and wide-ranging account of the social world of his day.

Customer Reviews

A masterpiece! utterly brilliant!
"Can you forgive her" is the best Trollope book I have ever read and although I am far from having read them all, I must have been through at least 12 of them. In "Can you forgive her?" spirited Alice Vavasor cannot reconcile herself to the idea of marrying the man she truly loves because his sedate style of life doesn't agree with Alice's idea that people who have knowledge and opportunity should make something useful of their lives.As a woman she cannot take an active part in political life and is therefore determined to be the helpmate of someone willing to take risks and to serve his fellowmen. She becomes engaged to her cousin whose political ambitions she respects but finds herself distraught at having promised herself to a man she cannot love... and then starts the long campaign of Mr John Grey, jilted lover of the resolute Alice, who is unable to come to terms with the fact that the woman he cherishes is not to be his and who is determined he shall overcome all obstacles and marry her after all.
The book is peopled with unforgettable characters from the wonderful aunt Greenow to the memorable farmer Cheeseacre who is desperate to get married but whose ideas of romance consist in telling the woman he covets how lucky she is to have been selected as his prospective bride...
And we meet Glencora Palliser, Alice's cousin, a young woman who has been married off to a prominent member of the establishemnt and who is deeply unhappy as she cannot forget the good-for-nothing but handsome and blue-eyed Burgo Fitzgerald her heart longs for...and a host of other people just as brilliantly sketched.
It is a very accomplished book, great fun and superbly written , with fewer repetitions than in other Trollope books, a book I have already read 3 times and which I will re read again as I find it incredibly good, and as its heroine, although complicated and sometimes annoying, is one of the best creations ever brought to life. You cannot help but feel for Alice whose unhappiness is all of her own doing but who will not resign herself to a life of empty social obligations and who yearns for more... and you have to respect her for that!

Passionate, wise and surprisingly entertaining
I started reading the Palliser novels after seeing a review describing them as "still the best description of British political life". They do, indeed, contain a lot of politics - particularly the later volumes, "Phineas Finn" and "Phineas Redux"; and this remains astonishingly contemporary. But the most up-to-date aspect of this extraordinary series of books is the sexual politics, as a series of vividly drawn women and men struggle to find happiness between social convention and sexual attraction. "Can You Forgive Her", which features the headstrong Lady Glencora Palliser and the intense Alice Vavasor both torn between desirable rakes and steady pillars of society, is to my mind one of the best of the series. It's also very funny, alive with irony and sophisticated wit.

For: beautiful writing, unforgettable characters, entertaining read.
Against: nothing. But it is quite long.

Complex characters
As one reviewer below has mentioned, this book does indeed take a while to grab your attention. For me it took at least 300 pages to really get going but once it did there was no putting it down.

Trollope's great trick is to get you to care about people you only half like and partially approve of. He very skillfully shifts your sympathies around from one character to another until by the end of the book you percieve them all fully rounded, with faults and virtues equally. You can even manage a small corner of sympathy for the most clearly 'bad' character in the book George Vavasor.

The other great thing about Trollope is his enormous understanding of women, their social position and the choices they face. What would he make of women today?