Short Fiction

Anthony Trollope is celebrated as the great architect of the long Victorian novel — Barsetshire, the Pallisers, the forty-seven books written to a famous daily quota. Far less known is that the same master produced more than forty short stories across his career, scattered at first through the magazines of his day. This volume gathers them, ordered by date of first publication, into a single companionable collection.

The range is extraordinary. There are travel tales drawn from Trollope's years criss-crossing the world for the Post Office — set in Antwerp and Cairo, Jamaica and Bermuda, Munich and Venice and on the steamer to Panama. There are the unforgettable editor's tales, in which the contributors of a literary magazine bring their hopes and manuscripts to the man who must decide their fate; among them The Spotted Dog, the tale of a brilliant, ruined scholar offered one last chance, is among the most moving things Trollope ever wrote. And there are the quiet domestic and provincial stories closest in spirit to the great novels: The Courtship of Susan Bell, The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne, and the fierce Cornish drama of Malachi's Cove.

Throughout, the qualities that readers love in the novels are all here in miniature: the patient realism, the gentle pervasive irony, the warm confiding narrative voice, and the lifelong Trollopian themes of money, love, work, and conscience. For readers who know the great chronicles, the short fiction is a revelation; for newcomers, it is the most inviting possible door into one of the warmest, wisest minds in English literature.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of these stories in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.