The Duke's Children

This, the last of the Palliser novels, makes a graceful close to one of the most vivid sagas in English Literature. As so often, Anthony Trollope sets himself a Herculaean task, by disposing of the reader's favourite character, Lady Glencora, by the third page. Her death overwhelms the Duke, though it need not do the same for the reader. For some months she had been with her family in Italy; there she had begun to connive at the mutual passion of her daughter - a strapping and potentially troublesome girl of nineteen - for a handsome twenty-two year old from Cornwall, who is a close friend of her brother, Lord Silverbridge. Her interference in this, without the Duke's knowledge, was the worst of her legacies, and it leads, as her actions before had so often led, into a sea of troubles. All is happily resolved by the end of the book. It is a measure of Trollope's sympathy that he makes the Duke so endearing when at bay, and also totally realistic.