The Eustace Diamonds

Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

4.4

Word count: 1.5M words
Chapters: 147

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony TrollopeAuthor: Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jan 1, 2005

Editor's review

The Eustace Diamonds is a novel in Trollope's Palliser series centred on property, marriage and respectability. The story turns on a diamond necklace of disputed ownership: after her husband's death, Lizzie Eustace struggles to keep it, setting off a layered contest among the family, lawyers and the social circle. Trollope's narrative is patient and dense, revealing his characters' calculations and self-deception through seemingly trivial everyday conversation and social scenes; legal detail and moral ambiguity intertwine, so the reading offers both the suspense of a advancing plot and a cool observation of Victorian ideas of property and women's circumstances. The book is long and slow-paced, suited to readers willing to follow the narrative and savour the characters' psychology. As a public-domain ebook it is easy to obtain, useful as supplementary reading for courses in English literature, and suitable as an introductory novel for understanding nineteenth-century English society and legal culture. Readers are advised to be patient with the long serial-style structure and to focus on character relationships and moral judgement.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who love Victorian English fiction and want to expand their reading of Trollope
Readers of long novels interested in property, marriage and legal ethics
English literature students needing a supplementary text on the nineteenth-century social novel
Readers used to slow-paced narrative who are willing to read dialogue and psychology closely

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer fast pacing and strong plot twists may find it slow
Readers hoping for a Chinese translation: this is an English-language original ebook
Those wholly unfamiliar with Victorian social and legal background who are unwilling to look things up

Reading tips

Read a summary of the earlier Palliser novels first to understand the character relationships before starting this book
Proceed chapter by chapter, briefly noting after each chapter changes in the diamond's ownership and in characters' positions
Mark legal and property terms as you go, then look them up together after reading the relevant plot
Read alongside other Trollope novels to observe the continuity of his narrative technique

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Do I need to read other works in the Palliser series first?

This book belongs to Trollope's Palliser series, and its characters and some plot points are linked to earlier works, but the core story centres on the Eustace diamonds and the main line can be understood on its own. To grasp the character relationships and political background more clearly, you may first learn the general plot of the earlier series, which will make entering this book smoother.

How difficult is the English original?

This is a nineteenth-century English novel with long sentences and considerable social dialogue and legal language, making it moderately to considerably difficult overall. Readers with university-level English can work through it with notes or a dictionary; those with less reading experience are advised to read an abridged version or a Chinese translation first to grasp the story, then attempt the original.

Is this book suitable for courses in English literature?

It is suitable as supplementary reading for the nineteenth-century English social novel, useful for discussing themes such as ideas of property, the marriage market and women's circumstances. Because it is long, courses may select chapters related to the ownership of the diamonds and Lizzie's situation for close reading, together with background materials on the period, rather than requiring the whole book.

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About the author

Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882 Author

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was a prolific English novelist of the Victorian era, with 83 works held in this collection. He is best known for the Barsetshire novels, including The Last Chronicle of Barset, Barchester Towers, and Framley Parsonage, which are set in a fictional English county and portray the daily life, social manners, and power struggles of the clergy and gentry. Other major works, such as The Way We Live Now, The Prime Minister, Orley Farm, and Can You Forgive Her?, turn to politics, business, and marriage, revealing with careful restraint and gentle irony the tension between social convention and personal ambition. Public information is limited, yet his plain narrative style, large casts of clearly drawn characters, and depiction of Victorian social structure retain lasting value for readers.