Among Trollope's last novels, Marion Fay turns on two crossings of the lines of rank. Lord Hampstead, heir to the Marquis of Kingsbury, loves Marion Fay, the daughter of a Quaker clerk in the City; his sister, Lady Frances Trafford, is determined to marry George Roden, a Post Office clerk.

By turns tragic and comic, it is a characteristic late-Trollope meditation on class, money and the stubbornness of the heart — drawing, in the Post Office thread, on the novelist's own long career in that service. First serialised in The Graphic (1881–82) before appearing in these three volumes, in the final year of Trollope's life.

Octavo, original yellow-ochre silk-grained cloth decorated in black, spines lettered in gilt. The classic Victorian "three-decker," in the form in which Trollope's readers first met the book.

Good, honestly described: cloth toned and rubbed with stains and soil, corners and spine-tips softened, volumes leaning; hinges cracked, several leaves starting, occasional foxing, vol. II endpapers dampstained. A complete set of the scarce three-volume first edition.

REFERENCES

Sadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography, 64; Wolff 6786; Tinker 2250; Irwin 28; Trollope Society Catalogue 71