'Trollope did not write for posterity,' observed Henry James. 'He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket.' Considered by contemporary critics to be Trollope's greatest novel, The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of London in the 1870s and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. 'I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age,' Trollope said.
His story concerns Augustus Melmotte, a French swindler and scoundrel, and his daughter, to whom Felix Carbury, adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury, is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope knew well the difficulties of dealing with editors, publishers, reviewers, and the public; his portrait of Lady Carbury, impetuous, unprincipled, and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion, is one of his finest satirical achievements.
His picture of late-nineteenth-century England is a portrait of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy. In The Way We Live Now Trollope combines his talents as a portraitist and his skills as a storyteller to give us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago.
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
November 1, 2000 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780679642039
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780679642039
- File size: 4037 KB
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 1080
- Text Difficulty: 7-9
Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
Levels
- Lexile® Measure:1080
- Text Difficulty:7-9
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