Can You Forgive Her

Can You Forgive Her? is Anthony Trollope's novel, first issued in monthly parts in 1864–1865, about choices in love, marriage, and political life. Alice Vavasor's uncertainty over her future is set beside the decisions of Lady Glencora Palliser and the widow Mrs Greenow. Their contrasting circumstances expose the pressures of wealth, family expectation, and social judgment. The narrator repeatedly asks how fairly one person can judge another's conduct. As the first Palliser novel, it introduces a social world in which domestic relationships and public ambition continually meet.