The Eustace Diamonds

by Anthony Trollope, Stephen Gill (Editor)

Overview

The central plot of The Eustace Diamonds (1872) involves the theft and ultimate discovery of a diamond necklace - the Eustace family heirloom. A splendid sense of the absurd permeates the novel and allows Trollope to examine "truth" in may contexts and at many levels of seriousness. Lizzie's unscrupulous lies do not prevent her final exposure, and it is, as Stephen Gill says in his Introduction, "this honesty, this clarity of vision that places Trollope with the greatest social novelists of the nineteenth century, with Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot."

In spite of its prevailing comedy, this rich and subtle novel reveals a sombre vision of the world, representing the mature Trollope's growing feelings about class structure and social change in England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780141907611
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	08/26/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	800
Sales rank:	970,636
File size:	931 KB
Age Range:	3 Months

About the Author

Helen Small is Fellow in English at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Editorial Reviews

Narrator David Shaw-Parker continues his marvelous tour of Trollope with this audiobook from the Palliser novels. Although the Pallisers are minor characters in this volume, we do get Shaw-Parker's memorable portrayal of the Duke of Omnium, as well as Lady Eustace's almost-but-not-quite-incomprehensible rural Scottish steward, Andy Gowran. Without doing full impersonations, this narrator uses intonation and accents—and his accents are masterly—to distinguish and portray the characters. Trollope was a man of his time, so there is an unfortunate anti-Semitic undertone to the audiobook, but the main story is about women in Victorian England and how they deal with the limitations of their social roles. There are also some interesting resonances with Thackeray's VANITY FAIR. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile