Welcome to A Taste for Trollope, a Truro Library reading group devoted to the British novel in the 19th century.

Anthony Trollope is perhaps the most beloved — and certainly the most prolific — of all the Victorian novelists.  He takes his place in a realist tradition that begins with Jane Austen, moves through Trollope and George Eliot, and ends with Henry James.  Beginning with Trollope, we will read the great fiction of the Victorian age.  And while our selections will be anchored in the realists, we will also explore the gothic tradition by way of the Brontës and the sensation fiction of the 1860s, especially the work of Wilkie Collins.

We meet the first and third Thursdays of the month from 4:00 – 5:30.  From June through mid-October we gather in person at the Truro Library, and from November through May we meet on Zoom.

Trollope is best known for his Barsetshire novels, a collection of books whose agrarian setting is among the most completely imagined places we can find in fiction, easily the equal of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Hardy’s Wessex.

 Please email here for more information.

The discussions are led by Jo Citron who holds a Ph.D. in English from Boston University and a J.D. from Northeastern.  She has taught at B.U., Bates, Wellesley, and even, for a New York minute, at M.I.T.  Between 2016 and 2023, she led study groups at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, the lifelong learning arm of Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education.