SOURCE: Yardley, Jonathan. “A Trollope for the 20th Century.” Washington Post, no. 305 (6 October 1993): B2.

In the following review, Yardley praises Trollope for her strong characterizations and “sensitivity to social nuance” in The Men and the Girls.

Yes, Joanna Trollope is, as you may well have suspected, “a descendant of 19th-century English novelist Anthony Trollope,” so the dust-wrapper copy for The Men and the Girls informs us. She is also, as you may well have hoped, Trollopian: not perhaps in pure literary fecundity (her career, after all, is still young), but certainly in sensitivity to social nuance and in strength of characterization. If she has a bit of a penchant for the soap-operatic, well, so too did her distant kinsman; she neutralizes it, though, with a touch of the irreverent and by simply being very good.

The Men and the Girls is what Random House calls Trollope's “fifth contemporary...