Anthony Trollope: The Landleaguers

The Landleaguers was the last novel Anthony Trollope wrote. Though Trollope had planned for Landleaguers to have 40 chapters, he barely made it into the 49th when he had the stroke that ended his writing and, shortly thereafter, his life. The Landleaguers is set in Ireland, a country which Trollope had visited. The earlier Irish woe Trollope had chronicled was the potato famine; in The Landleaguers, it is 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. A landlord’s son is murdered by rural terrorists, a crime that replays the real-life assassination of Lord Frederic Cavendish in Dublin in 1882, and The Landleaguers traces the violent disruption of civil life as tenants, organized in the Land League, plot to force their landlords to give them a better deal. But part of Trollope’s imaginative response to the crisis takes the form of an intriguingly uncharacteristic sub-plot, in which a young American woman travels to London and tries to make a name for herself on the operatic stage, while her father becomes a landleaguing Member of Parliament. 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.