Orley Farm

'Most of those among my friends who talk to me now about my novels, ' wrote Trollope in later life, 'and are competent to form an opinion on the subject, say that this is the best I have written.'

Indeed, this fictional account of a case of forgery was much admired by the author's greatest contemporaries, including George Eliot and G.H. Lewes. Trollope himself singles it out as displaying that combination of realistic and sensational effects which he felt to be the highest achievement available to the novelist. Plot strands concerning youthful marriage choices, middle-aged marital crisis, and the moving love and loss of an elderly man, centre on a legal action which results in the unjust acquittal of the central sympathetic character. The novel proposes a standard of morality higher than that embodied in the practice of an English court of law.

With its concern for social issues and its extensive coverage of middle-class and landed life, "Orley Farm" is a novel that demands attention in the rich field of nineteenth-century fiction.