Anthony Trollope's celebrated Parliamentary novels, of which The Eustace Diamonds (1873) is the third and most famous, are at once unfailingly amusing social comedies, melodramas of greed and deception, and precise nature studies of the political animal in its mid-Victorian habitat. With its purloined jewels, its conniving, resilient, mercenary heroine, and its partiality for the human spectacle in all its complexity, The Eustace Diamonds is a splendid...

Alice Vavasor, a girl of independent spirit and means, cannot decide whether to marry upright and gentlemanly John Grey or her ambitious but violent cousin, George. Alice's story is interwoven with that of the early married life of her friend, Lady Glencora.