Mary Gresley & Other Stories

This is a selection of Anthony Trollope's shorter fiction, written mainly in the 1860s, rather than a single novel. The stories move between a tumbledown Irish household, a long Atlantic passage, the Continent, and the offices of a London magazine. One follows a hunting guest through a night of farce; another watches courtship and class unease at sea; another turns on a young woman who brings a manuscript to an editor and must weigh writing against a safer marriage. An editor is also buttonholed by a plausible stranger in a Turkish bath. Money, respectability, and the gap between literary ambition and livelihood run through the book. The pieces are independent.

Bound in cream cloth. White dust-jacket printed in red.