Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35884 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 848 pages

About the Author
Anthony Trollope (1815 - 1882) established a successful career in the Post Office whilst also writing over forty novels, plus short stories. He enjoyed considerable acclaim during his lifetime. He is best remembered for the Barsetshire Chronicles. Stephen Wall has edited other works for Penguin Classics, including Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations.

Customer Reviews

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?

Trollope begins his Palliser novels.
Having almost completed chronicling the ecclesiastical affairs of Barchester in 1864, Anthony Trollope began a further series of six novels, this time depicting the English political scene of his day in general and the members of the Palliser family in particular.

This one, the first of the six novels, carries a title that carries no hint of any political content whatsoever. Indeed, the "her" of the title is a perverse young lady, Alice, who refuses for almost 900 pages to marry the man whom all agree is so eminently suitable. Alice is one of at least four women that Trollope presents, all of whom struggle to answer the question, "What should a woman do with her life?" As usual with his female characters, Trollope is a sensitive, sure and unsentimental narrator. The business of the men, and the political issues they address, seem to consist in keeping solvent, gaining a seat and an office in parliament, and sniffing out any parliamentary intrigues. All of which might suggest that this is one early Victorian novel that today's feminists could pick up, read, and enjoy.

I enjoy any Trollope novel immensely. No matter how slow moving, no matter how often he intrudes to comment on his characters and tell us what he does and does not know about them, every page of his novels and perhaps every sentence carries the stamp of a great novelist and language craftsman at work. Nevertheless, I must admit that "Can You Forgive Her?" has featured by my bedside for more than a year. This is not, therefore, a recommendation for something to quickly and thrillingly absorb the reader. It takes a long time to get to the novelist's final words, "But as they all ... have forgiven her, I hope that they who have followed her story to its close will not be less generous".

An introduction to the Pallisers
The central story of this novel follows the fortunes of Alice Vavasor as she wavers between two men and two lifestyles. The aptly named Mr Grey has the merit of truly caring for Alice rather than her money whereas her cousin George's suit seems based on ambition, freedom from debt and a desire to outdo his rival. The choices seem simple to the reader but Alice's stubborn nature is combined with a fickle moodiness that makes her follow a more complex path. Her attachment to her cousin thus seems harder and harder to understand as it becomes clear she guesses that a spiteful greed and hatred underlies his outer veneer. Later in the story, however, the light from the flawed character of Alice is almost lost in the glare from the vibrant Glencora, wife of the rich and powerful politician Plantagenet Palliser. Lady Glencora has already faced a very similar choice to that of Alice and is now trying to live with that decision. The Pallisers almost steal the show; setting-up the reader to enjoy the series of "Palliser" novels of which this is the first. This tale combines Trollope's excellent use of language with some memorable characters and events, all of which should hold the attention of anyone who enjoys classic satirical fiction.