Lady Anna was written on board the SS Great Britain while its author Anthony Trollope was travelling to visit family in Australia. Trollope was a successful writer of the Victorian period, and Lady Anna is now widely regarded as a classic, though it was unpopular on its initial release.
The story follows Countess Lovel's attempts to justify her claim to her title, and her daughter Anna's legitimacy, after her husband announces that he already has a wife.
Mother and daughter are driven apart when Anna defies her mother's wish that she marry her cousin, heir to her father's title, and falls in love with journeyman tailor and young radical Daniel Thwaite. This is a tightly constructed and passionate study of enforced marriage in the world of radical politics and social inequality.
Paperback
517 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978-0199537716