Wednesday, December 13, 2017

The Duke's Children

The Duke's Children /Anthony Trollope, 784 p.

My first novel by Trollope, someone who's been on my list for awhile.  This novel falls late in a sequence of novels about the Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, his family, friends, and other politicians and aristocrats of late nineteenth-century England. 

The Duke of Omnium, formerly England's Prime Minister and recently widowed, struggles with his three children.  Lord Silverbridge, the heir, likes horses and plans to enter Parliament as a (gasp!) conservative.  Gerald has been sent down from Cambridge and makes bad choices during a card game.  And sweet Mary is in love with the wrong man.  Essentially the story of a good but distant father who can't understand that his children are not extensions of himself and the trouble that results from this misconception.  Slow-moving, psychologically acute, and a resonant read for middle-aged parents, I enjoyed this but won't rush to read another.

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