Framley Parsonage

<p><strong><em>Framley Parsonage</em> is the fourth novel in Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire a richly comic and morally observant story of clerical ambition debt patronage courtship and social pressure.</strong> The Reverend Mark Robarts vicar of Framley is comfortable well-connected and dangerously susceptible to the glamour of political and aristocratic society. When he allows himself to be drawn into financial obligations by the unscrupulous Nathaniel Sowerby his good fortune begins to fray while his sister Lucy's attachment to Lord Lufton raises questions of rank family expectation and independence.</p><p>First published serially in <strong><em>Cornhill Magazine</em></strong> in 1860-1861 and in book form in 1861 <strong><em>Framley Parsonage</em></strong> deepens Trollope's Barsetshire world by bringing together the church Parliament landed society marriage politics and the daily negotiations of reputation. Trollope himself described the book as thoroughly English with much Church but more love-making a fair description of its balance: social comedy moral realism and humane attention to weakness rather than melodrama. For readers of Victorian fiction English social novels clerical fiction classic literary realism and the Barsetshire series this is one of Trollope's most approachable and rewarding works.</p>