The Duke's Children: The Only Complete Edition; Introduction by Max Egremont [Hardcover]

Newly restored from the original manuscript and more than a quarter longer than existing editions: one of the finest novels from one of the greatest English novelists is finally available in the form he intended.

Trollope wroteThe Duke’s Children, his final Palliser novel, as a four-volume work but was required by his publisher to reduce it to three, necessitating the loss of nearly sixty-five thousand words. A team of researchers led by Steven Amarnick has worked with the manuscript at Yale’s Beinecke Library to restore the novel to its original form. The result is richer and more complex, with a subtly different ending, a clearly superior book to the one that has always been published.
 
Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, has lost both his vivacious wife, Lady Glencora, and his position as prime minister of Great Britain. The bereft duke is left to try to manage his three grown children, whose rebellions take the various forms of gambling debts, university pranks, and unsuitable romantic attachments. But though he fails to understand his offspring, Palliser truly cares for them, and he navigates the clash of generations with a growing awareness of the necessity of compromises, both political and personal. Insightful, entertaining, and compassionate—and now restored to its full glory—The Duke’s Childrenis a fitting conclusion to the epic Palliser series, one of the most remarkable achievements of British fiction.“Trollope is that rare thing: a strong writer with a trustworthy imagination . . . Yet, beyond saying that his writing feels like life, it’s hard to say just how he works his magic . . . Trollope, quite uncynically, understands both what’s necessary to make the world go round and which way the world ought to be made to turn . . . Politics and gossip are still the essential life of the world . . . and any writer who can turn them into art will survivel“W