The Eustace Diamonds (English Library)

by Anthony Trollope (Author), Anthony Trollope (Author), Anthony Trollope (Author), Stephen Gill (Editor)

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  Paperback
  1973

  $3.25

  The central plot of The Eustace Diamonds (1872) involves the theft and ultimate discovery of a diamond necklace - the Eustace family heirloom. A splendid sense of the absurd permeates the novel and allows Trollope to examine truth in may contexts and at many levels of seriousness. Lizzie's unscrupulous lies do not prevent her final exposure, and it is, as Stephen Gill says in his Introduction, this honesty, this clarity of vision that places Trollope with the greatest social novelists of the nineteenth century, with Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot.

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  Paperback
  1993

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• New

  paperback
  

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  Following the death of her husband Sir Florian, beautiful Lizzie Eustace mysteriously comes into possession of a hugely expensive diamond necklace. She maintains it was a gift from her husband, but the Eustace lawyers insist she give it up, and while her cousin Frank takes her side, her new lover Lord Fawn states that he will only marry her if the necklace is surrendered. As gossip and scandal intensify, Lizzie's truthfulness is thrown into doubt, and, in her desire to keep the jewels, she is driven to increasingly desperate acts. The third in Trollope's Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds bears all the hallmarks of his later works, blending dark cynicism with humour and a keen perception of human nature.