description: Considered by contemporary critics to be Trollope's greatest novel, The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of nineteenth-century London and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. The story concerns Augustus Melmotte, a French swindler and scoundrel, and his daughter, to whom Felix Carbury, adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury, is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope's portrait of Lady Carbury, impetuous, unprincipled, and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion, is one of his finest satirical achievements. In his kaleidoscopic depiction of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy, Trollope gives us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago, while speaking eloquently to some of the governing obsessions of our own age.
language: English
title: The Way We Live Now
titlecomplete: The Way We Live Now (World's Classics)
characters: Lady Carbury, Augustus Melmotte, Hamilton K. Fisker, Sir Felix Carbury, Winifred Hurtle
genres: Literature, Novels, Victorian, 19th Century, Classics, Classic Literature, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction, British Literature
ratings_count: 12897
places: England
publisher: Oxford University Press