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The Landleaguers
Trollope's last novel, complete with boycotts, tenant uprisings, and murders, set in Ireland and England of the 1880s.
341 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1883
About the author
Anthony Trollope
2,781 books1,848 followersAnthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day.
Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_...
Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_...
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July 24, 2026Finished my penultimate Trollope novel! I must admit that I'm a bit weary after so many of his novels, so I'm leaving this unrated. I would definitely put this on the lower end of Trollope enjoyment, though that's not due to it being unfinished. Like with Wives and Daughters, it was pretty clear to see how things would wrap up eventually with the characters, though I feel unsatisfied with Trollope's wrapping up of the larger Irish questions he's exploring. It may be true to the historical record, though. I'm not sure. The situation seems like it was ongoing at Trollope’s death and not one that was easily addressed, as history attests.
The book began with more promise and petered out. Perhaps that was due to Trollope being at the end of his life, who knows? I didn't particularly enjoy the O'Mahonys and thought that their chapters took away from the focus of the Irish chapters, though I preferred Mr O’Mahoney to his daughter. Rachel was a bit much. 😅 My buddy readers and I speculated that she is how Trollope sees American women: brash, willing to be in the spotlight, self willed, and decisive. His English heroines tend to be quite different, softer and more submissive (though often stubborn as all get out!).
There was also way too much about Tom Daly and his hunting towards the beginning of the novel. Florian's story with his Catholic conversion and his relationships with the various priests was also introduced early on but not carried through the plot. I was so interested in the three priests and their various political convictions in the very politically divided climate of Ireland at the time. I wanted much more of the religious aspect of Ireland's struggles generally too. This veered more towards the political. The American influence on Ireland at the time (early 1880s) was fascinating.
We get another impossibly stubborn female character here too. She also had so much promise at the beginning of the story and devolved into just that one stubborn opinion at the end. I would have liked to have seen how her story played out, though Trollope’s son has a note at the end about the couple of things that would have happened by the end of the novel and it includes her.
I think Mr Jones had a lot of potential as a character. Captain Yorke Clayton was absolutely the best thing about this novel.
Don't start here with Trollope. (That would be highly unusual!) Trollope is Brilliant and My Favorite Victorian Author. It’s just that 47 novels is just a lot for a reader who thrives on variety! 😂
The book began with more promise and petered out. Perhaps that was due to Trollope being at the end of his life, who knows? I didn't particularly enjoy the O'Mahonys and thought that their chapters took away from the focus of the Irish chapters, though I preferred Mr O’Mahoney to his daughter. Rachel was a bit much. 😅 My buddy readers and I speculated that she is how Trollope sees American women: brash, willing to be in the spotlight, self willed, and decisive. His English heroines tend to be quite different, softer and more submissive (though often stubborn as all get out!).
There was also way too much about Tom Daly and his hunting towards the beginning of the novel. Florian's story with his Catholic conversion and his relationships with the various priests was also introduced early on but not carried through the plot. I was so interested in the three priests and their various political convictions in the very politically divided climate of Ireland at the time. I wanted much more of the religious aspect of Ireland's struggles generally too. This veered more towards the political. The American influence on Ireland at the time (early 1880s) was fascinating.
We get another impossibly stubborn female character here too. She also had so much promise at the beginning of the story and devolved into just that one stubborn opinion at the end. I would have liked to have seen how her story played out, though Trollope’s son has a note at the end about the couple of things that would have happened by the end of the novel and it includes her.
I think Mr Jones had a lot of potential as a character. Captain Yorke Clayton was absolutely the best thing about this novel.
Don't start here with Trollope. (That would be highly unusual!) Trollope is Brilliant and My Favorite Victorian Author. It’s just that 47 novels is just a lot for a reader who thrives on variety! 😂
June 16, 2016
The Landleaguers, Trollope's last novel (No. 51 in his oeuvre), was published posthumously in 1883. Three things make it difficult to recommend:
It is unfinished. It abruptly ends in the middle of Chapter 49. He had planned 60 chapters.
The setting (the 1879-1882 Irish Land Wars) is obscure, thirty years before the Easter Rising and the partition of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Trollope wrote shortly after the conflict. It would be like a best-selling author publishing a novel last year about Ferguson.
There are more murders than I've ever read in a Trollope before. This is guerrilla warfare. Someone is walking down the road and, crack, he's dead. Murders here, murders there, murders everywhere.
The abrasive Catholic - Protestant tension was inescapable. A ten-year-old boy, the lord's youngest son, independently converts to Catholicism. He has got it into his head that the Catholics are a downtrodden people, and therefore he will be one of them. / That is such bosh, said Ada. / It is so, to your thinking, but not to his.
But, I force myself to be patient when I'm reading Trollope. He sets up situations that provoke me to ponder how I would handle them. My faith is precious to me; how would I respond to a child who converts to a different faith? One female character is making big money on the stage; her fiancé would rather break off the engagement than be supported by his wife.
And the humor! Ah, this book was worth it for the laughs!
"But Mr. Jones is gone?" asked Moss.
"But she is not on that account ready to transfer her affections at a moment's notice. To her view of the matter there seems to be something a little indelicate in the idea."
"Bah!" said Mr. Moss.
"You cannot make her change her mind by saying bah."
When an English earl wants to marry an American singer, the earl's father would be of the opinion that any bride whom his son might choose would be, by the very fact, raised to the top of the peerage. His mother was a religious woman, to whom any matrimony for her son would be an achievement.
"Don't you think your father is making an ass of himself, —just a little, you know?" He [the 40-year-old earl] was not her "Love's young dream." But she intended that his lordship should become love's old reality. She felt this would not become the case, if love's old reality were to tell her often that her father was an ass.
a downright positive old blue-bottle nincoompoop
I still want to read through all of Anthony Trollope's writing. I've read 12 out of 53.
It is unfinished. It abruptly ends in the middle of Chapter 49. He had planned 60 chapters.
The setting (the 1879-1882 Irish Land Wars) is obscure, thirty years before the Easter Rising and the partition of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Trollope wrote shortly after the conflict. It would be like a best-selling author publishing a novel last year about Ferguson.
There are more murders than I've ever read in a Trollope before. This is guerrilla warfare. Someone is walking down the road and, crack, he's dead. Murders here, murders there, murders everywhere.
The abrasive Catholic - Protestant tension was inescapable. A ten-year-old boy, the lord's youngest son, independently converts to Catholicism. He has got it into his head that the Catholics are a downtrodden people, and therefore he will be one of them. / That is such bosh, said Ada. / It is so, to your thinking, but not to his.
But, I force myself to be patient when I'm reading Trollope. He sets up situations that provoke me to ponder how I would handle them. My faith is precious to me; how would I respond to a child who converts to a different faith? One female character is making big money on the stage; her fiancé would rather break off the engagement than be supported by his wife.
And the humor! Ah, this book was worth it for the laughs!
"But Mr. Jones is gone?" asked Moss.
"But she is not on that account ready to transfer her affections at a moment's notice. To her view of the matter there seems to be something a little indelicate in the idea."
"Bah!" said Mr. Moss.
"You cannot make her change her mind by saying bah."
When an English earl wants to marry an American singer, the earl's father would be of the opinion that any bride whom his son might choose would be, by the very fact, raised to the top of the peerage. His mother was a religious woman, to whom any matrimony for her son would be an achievement.
"Don't you think your father is making an ass of himself, —just a little, you know?" He [the 40-year-old earl] was not her "Love's young dream." But she intended that his lordship should become love's old reality. She felt this would not become the case, if love's old reality were to tell her often that her father was an ass.
a downright positive old blue-bottle nincoompoop
I still want to read through all of Anthony Trollope's writing. I've read 12 out of 53.
May 26, 2007
I've been reviewing Trollope's novels in the order they were published (in book form), which is not always the order in which they were written. An Old Man's Love is the last of Trollope's novels to be published, but The Landleaguers is the last he wrote. In fact, he had barely made it into the 49th of a planned 60 chapters when he had the stroke that ended his writing and, shortly thereafter, his life.
For The Landleaguers Trollope returns to Ireland, the setting of several of his other novels, including the first two. In fact he toured Ireland with his amanuensis-niece in preparation for writing The Landleaguers. The earlier Irish woe Trollope had chronicled was the potato famine, now it's the often bloody conflict between English protestants and Irish Catholics.
Trollope loved Ireland and his novels often reflect that, but The Landleaguers, with its realistic depiction of terrorism, seems to despair of Ireland's future.
There is a subplot involving the daughter of an American supporter of the Irish campaign against the English; the daughter has come to London to further her career and there are sexual intrigues there. (This subplot is not as unrelated to the main plot as this summary makes it appear.)
Trollope's son Henry wrote a brief foreword to the novel and added a two-sentence postscript announcing the fates that Trollope had planned for the novel's main characters.
For The Landleaguers Trollope returns to Ireland, the setting of several of his other novels, including the first two. In fact he toured Ireland with his amanuensis-niece in preparation for writing The Landleaguers. The earlier Irish woe Trollope had chronicled was the potato famine, now it's the often bloody conflict between English protestants and Irish Catholics.
Trollope loved Ireland and his novels often reflect that, but The Landleaguers, with its realistic depiction of terrorism, seems to despair of Ireland's future.
There is a subplot involving the daughter of an American supporter of the Irish campaign against the English; the daughter has come to London to further her career and there are sexual intrigues there. (This subplot is not as unrelated to the main plot as this summary makes it appear.)
Trollope's son Henry wrote a brief foreword to the novel and added a two-sentence postscript announcing the fates that Trollope had planned for the novel's main characters.
April 19, 2022
The Landleaguers is admittedly no one’s favorite Anthony Trollope novel. However, starting 25 April 2022, the “Group Reading of Anthony Trollope” will begin reading The Landleaguers online. The reading will last about a month.
The Trollope reading group is an email and online book group that has collectively read and discussed the works of Anthony Trollope for decades.
The group is diverse. Some of the participants are Trollope experts, others are just readers who enjoy Trollope. Volunteers start the week’s discussion with a summary of the week’s chapters. Then the group joins in, explaining what they like, dislike, or don’t understand. Often, experts offer in depth background. Other times, we compare Victorian sentiments to current mores or exchange detailed discussion of character and plot. Some members contribute photos and illustrations.
With summaries, participants don’t have to drop out if they can’t keep up with the reading pace or have read the work previously and don’t care to read it again.
We’re reading The Landleaguers for completeness, not for its literary merit. However, knowing the group, strengths will be discussed that might otherwise be missed. For myself, I have often changed my feelings about a particular book or character from the group discussion.
If The Landleaguers is not to your taste, we’ll start one of the more easily liked Barsetshire novels next.
The only rules of the group are that we stay polite and mutually respectful. We avoid contemporary subjects, especially politics. Everyone’s comments are welcome but participants are not obliged to comment. The group is international with members on at least three continents.
There are no fees and anyone can subscribe by going to https://trollope.groups.io/g/main and following the instructions there. You will be asked to explain your interest in Trollope to discourage spammers and robots, but we are open to anyone.
July 23, 2021
I have long loved Anthony Trollope, and started this book with the thought that 3/4 of a Trollope was better than none at all. Well, the so-called heroine was overly precious AND an anti-Semite, and I just did not want to spend any more time with her.
November 28, 2020
Unlike many posthumously published, unfinished works, the completed portions of The Landleaguers read very much like a completed draft, something I attribute to Trollope's experience in writing serialized novels, and I must commend the richness of both the prose and the characters that populate this work, as well as the excellent choice of historical setting: the then-current Irish land war, one of the many bits of 19th century revolutionary history that have been completely forgotten by the American audience that did much to inspire it.
Still, I found something lacking from the Landleaguers - and not just the last eleven and a half chapters. Trollope has assembled a whole cavalcade of excellent characters (including some truly excellent minor ones like Black Tom and Mr. Mahony) and placed them in the middle of a stark world beset with with political and social upheaval, but having assembled his tinder, he seems incapable of lighting the fire. It is not that the book lacks in plot, or has too many political digressions (indeed, given their unrepentant conservatism, I found many of the diatribes quite refreshing in their outlook); rather that the book seems to lurch from scene to scene in a slapdash manner that not only fails to live up to the standard set by the prose and the characters, but also seeks to undermine them and their realism. Characters appear and disappear, only to appear again when the plot needs to be driven forward again, towards a new climactic scene, or historical events will suddenly intervene to inject new life at points when the novel seems to be losing momentum.
In short, the Landleaguers could have made for an excellent collection of short stories and character studies in the manner of a Chekov or a D. H. Lawrence, but instead (due no doubt to the literary demands of Trollope's time) good stitched haphazardly together into a novel that would never have been more than mediocre, even had Trollope lived to complete it.
Still, I found something lacking from the Landleaguers - and not just the last eleven and a half chapters. Trollope has assembled a whole cavalcade of excellent characters (including some truly excellent minor ones like Black Tom and Mr. Mahony) and placed them in the middle of a stark world beset with with political and social upheaval, but having assembled his tinder, he seems incapable of lighting the fire. It is not that the book lacks in plot, or has too many political digressions (indeed, given their unrepentant conservatism, I found many of the diatribes quite refreshing in their outlook); rather that the book seems to lurch from scene to scene in a slapdash manner that not only fails to live up to the standard set by the prose and the characters, but also seeks to undermine them and their realism. Characters appear and disappear, only to appear again when the plot needs to be driven forward again, towards a new climactic scene, or historical events will suddenly intervene to inject new life at points when the novel seems to be losing momentum.
In short, the Landleaguers could have made for an excellent collection of short stories and character studies in the manner of a Chekov or a D. H. Lawrence, but instead (due no doubt to the literary demands of Trollope's time) good stitched haphazardly together into a novel that would never have been more than mediocre, even had Trollope lived to complete it.
September 5, 2026
This was Trollope’s last book. He actually returned to Ireland twice, where he had come into his own decades earlier, to research and prepare for it. It’s also his fourth Irish novel, and deals with the Land League and the Irish tenant farmers who were fighting for better terms and greater security on the land they worked (think Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the beginning of Far and Away).
Thankfully, his son knew the general ending, and the book is about 80% complete before you reach the unfinished portion. Henry Trollope included a note about what his father intended for some of the characters.
It has some heavier themes and elements not found in his other works—a singer on the London stage, death threats to a young child, a policeman love interest… and I enjoyed every minute!
Thankfully, his son knew the general ending, and the book is about 80% complete before you reach the unfinished portion. Henry Trollope included a note about what his father intended for some of the characters.
It has some heavier themes and elements not found in his other works—a singer on the London stage, death threats to a young child, a policeman love interest… and I enjoyed every minute!
February 18, 2021
This is the first Trollope book I've disliked. Some of his works are less good than others but they're almost always redeemed by a good yarn and some strong characters. This was left unfinished at his death or the story strikes out (not that it was great in any case). There's a very Tory view of Ireland and the land war expressed here which doesn't admit of any other perspective. The novel is blighted by a condescending attitude to the Irish in general and the poorest of them in particular. Not much fun all round.
August 14, 2018
Trollope wasn't able to complete this book, but what he did leave us was enough to thoroughly enjoy, IMHO. The postscript at the end tells his intentions for the main characters, but it can pretty well be guessed at.
July 27, 2008
Trollope’s last (and unfinished) work. One might classify it among his political novels, but that would be an injustice to his magnificent Palliser series. It is set in Ireland which, for all his 40 years there, he could only see through the eyes of an English squire. The Irish tenantry and peasantry are claiming back what perhaps was once their own, but no reasonable (English) man can now reasonably consider to be so. They are little more than a thieving and deceitful bunch of Roman Catholic boycotters, with more than their fair share of murderers among them. The romantic stories he tries to build on this background fail completely. The one figure of note is Rachel O’Mahony, who sings her way to fame and fortune on the London stage while keeping her many suitors at proper bay. A pity that the richness of her character collapses with her voice. She at any rate made me give the book a rating of 2 instead of a 1-flat.
November 14, 2016
Definitely not a Trollope must-read.
December 3, 2016
I really wish he could have finished this book.
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