Recommendations
Books Like Barchester Towers
Best books to read after Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope's most beloved Barsetshire novel (1857) is the finest cathedral city comedy in Victorian fiction — the arrival of Mrs. Proudie and Slope, the comic ecclesiastical politics, and the Signora's devastating wit. These recommendations extend the experience through the Barsetshire sequence, through Victorian comedy of manners, and through the tradition of institutional social comedy that Trollope perfected.
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The Warden
by Anthony Trollope
The natural predecessor — reading The Warden before Barchester Towers gives full appreciation of Mr. Harding's character and the Barchester world that the Proudies and Slope are invading; the two novels together form the most satisfying unit in the Barsetshire sequence.
- 2Buy
The Last Chronicle of Barset
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's finest novel and the conclusion of the Barsetshire sequence — all the characters from Barchester Towers appear in their final form, Mrs. Proudie meets her end, and the full weight of the Barchester world is brought to bear on Mr. Crawley's crisis; the most emotionally satisfying ending to the sequence.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The great Victorian provincial novel — Eliot's Middlemarch shares Barchester Towers's interest in how institutional culture (the Church, the hospital, the county) shapes individual lives and how principled individuals navigate the social pressures that surround them; the most ambitious successor to Trollope's cathedral city project.
- 4Buy
The Eustace Diamonds
by Anthony Trollope
The most immediately entertaining of the Palliser novels and the best entry point to Trollope's other major sequence — sharing Barchester Towers's gift for comic characterization and its interest in a woman who manipulates the social world around her, but in the very different setting of London political society.
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Framley Parsonage
by Anthony Trollope
The fourth Barsetshire novel and the one that most directly continues Barchester Towers's social world — Mark Robarts's financial entanglement and Lucy Robarts's romantic plot extend the Barsetshire characters and add a new generation; the novel Trollope wrote when he returned to Barchester after a decade away.
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The Vicar of Wakefield
by Oliver Goldsmith
The eighteenth-century ancestor of Barchester Towers's comedy of a gentle clergyman in a difficult social world — Goldsmith's Vicar Primrose and Trollope's Mr. Harding share a similar quality of unworldly goodness, and reading the two novels together shows the tradition of the good-hearted clergyman in English fiction.
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Doctor Thorne
by Anthony Trollope
The third Barsetshire novel and the most romantic — Frank Gresham's determined courtship of Mary Thorne despite her illegitimate birth and poverty is organized as a love story in the most conventional sense, while the social and financial complications around them show Barsetshire from a different class perspective than Barchester Towers.
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He Knew He Was Right
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's darkest novel and the one that most directly shows what his social comedy could become when pushed toward tragedy — Louis Trevelyan's jealous obsession with his wife's supposed infidelity develops with the same inexorability that Mrs. Proudie's church politics develop in Barchester Towers, but to a devastating rather than comic conclusion.
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