The Landleaguers

The Landleaguers, Trollope's last novel, is set in Ireland during the Land War of the early 1880s. It is both a documentary record, closely following events in Westminster and the Irish countryside, and a meditative fantasy. A landlord's son is murdered by rural terrorists, a crime that replays the real-life assassination of Lord Frederic Cavendish in Dublin in 1882, and the novel traces the violent disruption of civil life as tenants, organized in the Land League, plot to force their landlords to give them a better deal. But part of Trollope's imaginative response to the crisis takes the form of an intriguingly uncharacteristic sub-plot, in which a young American woman travels to London and tries to make a name for herself on the operatic stage, while her father becomes a landleaguing Member of Parliament. In the introduction to this edition Mary Hamer provides a historically based reading of the sub-plot and relates it to Trollope's own personal stake in the crisis between England and Ireland.


Genre: Literary Fiction