Quick Take
- Narration: David Shaw-Parker brings the social textures of Trollope’s Victorian England to life with clear period register, handling the multiple narrative strands without losing the listener across 33 hours.
- Themes: Women’s autonomy and social constraint, money and respectability in Victorian England, romantic indecision
- Mood: Warm and morally absorbing, with an ironic undertow that sharpens as it progresses
- Verdict: A richly rewarding entry into Trollope’s Palliser cycle and one of the stronger Victorian novels in audio, provided you have the patience for its unhurried pace.
I started Can You Forgive Her? on a long drive across the south of France, and I finished it three weeks later on trains, in hotel rooms, and during a particularly slow afternoon in Lyon. Trollope is one of those novelists who rewards exactly that kind of fragmented, life-embedded listening. You do not need to hold the whole architecture of the book in your head at once because he builds it for you, brick by careful brick, over thirty-three hours. By the time I was halfway through, Alice Vavasor’s persistent indecision had stopped being frustrating and had started being fascinating. That shift is the sign of a novelist who knows something real about human nature.
Can You Forgive Her? opens the Palliser series, but Trollope is careful to make it function as a standalone. The central question, what should a woman do with her life, is announced plainly in the synopsis and it is not rhetorical. Alice Vavasor is young, wealthy, and free by the standards of her era, and yet the title’s challenge falls directly on her. Torn between the reliable but uninspiring John Grey and her brilliant, reckless cousin George, she makes decisions that confound the people who love her. Trollope does not excuse her, but he does not condemn her either. His irony operates in a register so even-handed that it took me several chapters to realize which side he was actually on. That ambiguity is the book’s real subject.
Three Women, Three Variations on the Same Problem
What the synopsis does not fully convey is the structural richness of the novel. Alice’s story is paralleled by two other women whose situations illuminate the question from different angles. Lady Glencora Palliser, who would go on to become one of Trollope’s most beloved creations across the entire six-book sequence, appears here in her first major outing. Her marriage to the upright and politically ambitious Plantagenet Palliser is one of convenience and social calculation. The tension between what she gave up and what she has is more openly felt, more emotionally charged, than Alice’s story, and many readers find Glencora’s thread the heart of the book. The third parallel narrative, belonging to the older widow Mrs. Greenow, provides a darkly comic counterpoint that keeps the novel from becoming oppressively serious.
This structural interweaving is one of Trollope’s great skills, and in audio it works particularly well because the listener moves between the three women in a rhythm that feels organic rather than mechanical. Shaw-Parker handles the transitions with care, differentiating the registers of each story without overplaying the contrast. The novel is long, as Victorian serial fiction tends to be, but it does not feel padded. The pacing is slow by contemporary standards, but deliberately so. Trollope is watching his characters from close range, and the attention accumulates into genuine understanding.
The Political Threads Beneath the Romance
One of the reviewers for this title makes a sharp observation: Trollope’s London parliamentary politics and the romantic trials of his characters are not as separate as they first appear. The question of what a woman should do with her life is inseparable from the question of how Victorian society allocates power, which is also the question the novel’s political scenes are examining through a different lens. Plantagenet Palliser’s ambitions run alongside Lady Glencora’s constrained freedom in a way that is not coincidental. Trollope is drawing a map of his era’s power structures, and the romance and the politics are different paths across the same terrain.
Listeners who have read the Barsetshire series before this will recognize Trollope’s method, and the novel rewards that prior familiarity. One reviewer notes that Plantagenet Palliser makes a brief appearance in The Small House at Allington, and meeting him more fully here has a particular pleasure to it. New readers to Trollope will find Can You Forgive Her? a complete enough experience that prior knowledge is not required.
Thirty-Three Hours, and Whether You Have Them
The runtime is the honest consideration. Thirty-three hours is a serious commitment, and Victorian serial fiction is not built for listeners who want propulsive forward momentum. Shaw-Parker’s narration is excellent without being showy, which is exactly right for prose that does its work quietly. But this is not a novel that delivers payoffs quickly. Readers who loved Middlemarch or North and South in audio form will find themselves in familiar and comfortable territory. Readers who want their nineteenth-century fiction edited for pace will struggle.
What Trollope offers in return is a portrait of women navigating impossible choices with imperfect tools in a world that has already decided what they should want. The title’s question is not sentimental. He is asking you to weigh Alice’s choices seriously, and the experience of doing so across thirty-three hours is something that shorter, faster books do not provide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to read the Barsetshire series before starting Can You Forgive Her? and the Palliser novels?
No. Trollope wrote the two series separately and Can You Forgive Her? works as a standalone entry point into the Palliser world. Readers who have read The Small House at Allington will enjoy a continuity note with Plantagenet Palliser, but it is not required knowledge.
Is Lady Glencora Palliser a major character in this first book, or does she become important only in later volumes?
Lady Glencora is a significant presence in Can You Forgive Her? and many readers consider her storyline the emotional center of the novel. Her character develops across all six Palliser novels, but she is fully and compellingly drawn here from the start.
How does David Shaw-Parker handle a novel with multiple parallel narrative threads?
Shaw-Parker navigates the three women’s storylines with clear tonal differentiation, maintaining the register of each without overplaying the contrast. At 33 hours the narration remains consistent, which is a real accomplishment for Victorian prose of this scope.
Is the 33-hour runtime justified, or does the novel feel padded by serial fiction conventions?
The length is intrinsic to Trollope’s method rather than a product of filler. The novel moves slowly by contemporary standards, but each strand develops meaningfully. Listeners who have enjoyed Middlemarch or other Victorian novels in audio form will find the pacing familiar and rewarding rather than excessive.
