The Claverings

At the opening of The Claverings (1866) the beautiful Julia Brabazon jilts her lover Harry Clavering in order to make a marriage of convenience with a wealthy but dissolute earl. Harry licks his wounds, leaves London to train as a civil engineer, and falls in love with his employer's daughter, to whom he soon becomes engaged. But when Julia returns unexpectedly as a wealthy widow, the flame of Harry's old love is rekindled. In his depiction of this quintessential love triangle, Anthony Trollope digs deep into the psychological make-up of a wonderful array of flawed characters: emotionally strong, determined women whose only prospects depend on making an advantageous marriage; a weak-willed, vacillating anti-hero who in a moment of weakness makes an impossible promise; and a memorable cast of secondary characters, from a suspected Russian spy and a feckless gambler to a zealous evangelical clergyman.