Start with The Warden. It is under two hundred pages, it is the gateway to the six Barsetshire novels, and it does something unexpected for a Victorian novel: it takes a small ecclesiastical dispute about the income from a charitable hospital and treats every side sympathetically, including the sides that are wrong. Trollope's defining quality is that he refuses to make anyone a villain, and The Warden is where you find out whether that appeals to you or bores you.
There is a real counter-argument, and it deserves a hearing. The Warden is slight — quiet, small-scale, with a hero whose defining act is resignation — and a lot of readers close it unconvinced. Barchester Towers, the second novel, is much funnier, much bigger, and contains Mrs Proudie and Obadiah Slope, two of the best comic creations in English fiction. If you find The Warden thin, do not conclude that Trollope is not for you. Read Barchester Towers and then decide. It stands on its own perfectly well.
Barsetshire, in order
The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The small house at Allington, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
Read these in sequence. They are only loosely connected — each is a complete novel with its own plot — but characters recur, reputations carry over, and the cumulative effect is the point. Doctor Thorne is the most popular of the six with general readers, The small house at Allington introduces Lily Dale, over whom Trollope's readers argued for a century, and The Last Chronicle of Barset is widely held to be his best novel and depends entirely on your having read the others.
The Palliser novels
The political sequence is more tightly connected than Barsetshire and follows Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Glencora through parliamentary life. Our path covers Can you forgive her?, Phineas Finn, the Irish member, The Eustace diamonds and The Prime Minister.
Be aware that two volumes of the six are missing from this list — Phineas Redux, which directly continues the Phineas Finn story, and The Duke's Children, which closes the sequence. You will want both, and their absence here reflects our catalogue rather than the series.
Barsetshire first, then Palliser. The clergy novels are warmer, funnier and more forgiving; the political ones are better novels and demand more patience with parliamentary procedure and electoral detail.
The standalones, and the shortcut
The way we live now is Trollope's masterpiece by a good number of critical accounts — a savage 1875 satire on financial speculation, built around a swindling financier whose credit exists purely because everyone believes in it. It is also the single best answer to "I will read one Trollope, which one?", because it needs no context and reads as though it were written about the present.
He knew he was right is the other major standalone: a study of a marriage destroyed by a husband's jealousy, and much darker than his reputation suggests. It is the book to read when someone tells you Trollope is comfortable.
The autobiography, read last
An autobiography is essential and it damaged him for eighty years. In it Trollope described his working method with total candour — a set number of words before breakfast, a watch on the desk, a new novel begun the same day the last was finished — and Victorian critics decided that a man who wrote like a clerk could not be an artist. His reputation only fully recovered in the twentieth century. Read it after several novels, when you can see how much art the method concealed.
Honest warning
Trollope wrote forty-seven novels and they are long. He also narrates in his own voice, interrupting to tell you what he thinks of his characters, which some readers find companionable and others find intrusive. That is a matter of taste, not quality, and it is worth discovering in a two-hundred-page book rather than an eight-hundred-page one.
Browse more Victorian and classic literature paths on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Anthony Trollope Reading Order: Where to Start.
