The fourth of the Barsetshire Chronicles, Framley Parsonage was published to wide acclaim and has always been one of Trollope's most popular novels. In it the values of a Victorian clergyman Mark Robarts, are put to the test. Through a combination of naivety and social ambition, Robarts is compromised and brought to the brink of ruin. Trollope tells his story with great compassion, offsetting the drama with his customary humour. Like all the Barsetshire novels, it is an extraordinarily evocative picture of everyday life in nineteenth-century England. Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, English judge Lord Denning, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne, poet Edward Fitzgerald, artist Edward Gorey, who kept a complete set of his books, American author Robert Caro and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he had regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.