Can You Forgive Her?

The first of Trollope's six Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her? explores the dilemma of Alice Vavasor, torn between two suitors, and the choices faced by two other independent women. The tensions within Victorian society highlighted by the plot are illuminated in the introduction and notes to this new edition.

Dinah Birch writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, and contributes to arts programmes on radio and television. She is the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature and of Oxford World's Classics editions of Ruskin's Selected Writings and Gaskell's Cranford.