Cousin Henry

Anthony Trollope's Cousin Henry (1879) is one of the boldest experiments of his late career — a short, near-claustrophobic psychological study of a single guilty, irresolute mind. At Llanfeare, on the Welsh coast, the old squire Indefer Jones lies dying, torn between his love for his niece Isabel Brodrick and his almost religious belief that a landed estate must descend in the male line. He makes will after will, and at the last, his conscience overruling his creed, leaves everything to Isabel — and then dies, and that final will cannot be found.

By an earlier will the estate passes instead to his nephew, the weak and unloved London clerk Henry Jones — 'Cousin Henry.' But Henry alone knows that the missing document was never destroyed: it lies hidden where his uncle left it, folded inside a volume of sermons on the library shelf, and he knows the very page. He need only burn it, or only reveal it. He can do neither. To destroy it is a crime he has not the nerve for; to disclose it is to surrender everything and confess. So he leaves it, and sits with his secret, while the lawyer Apjohn grows suspicious, the county turns cold, and a local newspaper all but names him in print.

From this single hidden book Trollope wrings an extraordinary tension. With unsparing patience and a cool, steady irony, he takes us inside the mind of a man who is neither villain nor hero but a coward — and makes of him a searching study of conscience, moral paralysis, and the torment of a thing left undone. It is a tale, too, of being watched: of how the suspicion of a whole community can become a torture quite apart from guilt, and of the hard old question of whether an estate belongs by right to the worthy or only by law to the heir. Spare, modern, and gripping, Cousin Henry is one of the quiet masterpieces of Victorian psychological fiction.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1879 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.