Trollope - Lady Anna in Bedford Square

On Monday 18th January 2010 we enjoyed our first session of the reading group in Foster Court, UCL. We looked at Anthony Trollope's Lady Anna (1874), one of his lesser known novels, whose legally-themed plot is mostly enacted within a small nexus of Bloomsbury streets. We explored the novel's rendering of the complex interaction of class identity and urban space, by the way characters in the novel are placed (and place themselves) within London's local geography, and we thought about the representation of Keppel Street in Lady Anna, the street in which Trollope was himself born. We also compared our own ideas about the success or otherwise of the novel - and about its feisty heroine! - with some reviews that appeared in the periodical press in the immediate wake of its first publication.