Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65) is the first of the six Palliser novels, the great sequence of parliamentary and domestic life that many readers count his finest achievement — and one of the nineteenth century's most searching novels about women's freedom and the narrow limits of choice.

At its centre is Alice Vavasor, an intelligent, serious young woman who cannot decide what to do with herself. She is engaged to the faultless John Grey, and breaks it off, fearing that a placid life beside so admirable a man will leave her nothing to do. Instead she turns back toward her fierce, ambitious, dangerous cousin George Vavasor — and the title follows her wavering, daring the reader to forgive the harm her indecision does, chiefly to herself.

Braided against Alice's story are two others. Her cousin Lady Glencora, married against her heart to the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser, comes to the very edge of eloping with the man she loved — and out of that crisis Trollope builds the marriage at the heart of the whole series. And in a glorious comic counter-melody, the wealthy widow Mrs Greenow, courted at once by a blustering farmer and a penniless rogue, knows exactly what she wants and exactly how to get it. Read side by side, the three women make a single sustained study of what a woman of Trollope's England was permitted to want, and at what cost.

Told in the most companionable narrator's voice in English fiction, and set against a precisely observed world of Parliament, patronage, and great Whig houses, this is the gateway to the Palliser novels and the best place in all of Trollope to begin them.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1865 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.