Doctor Thorne

Doctor Thorne is a novel by the English writer Anthony Trollope, published in 1858 as the third of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, between Barchester Towers and Framley Parsonage.

The story is set in the village of Greshamsbury and turns on three families: the Greshams, whose estate is entailed and whose debts are worse than they admit; the Thornes, meaning the doctor and his niece; and the Scatcherds, whose fortune was made by a builder and whose affairs are in the doctor's hands. Mary has been raised by her uncle after the death of her parents, and she is clever, fond of the great house and entirely without a dowry. Lady Arabella's decision to end the friendship between Mary and her son is the engine of the plot, because Frank Gresham is stubborn where his mother is calculating and refuses to accept that the family's rescue depends on his marrying an heiress. The obligation takes him as far as proposing to a woman he does not love, with a result that lands somewhere between comedy and humiliation. Around the central romance Trollope arranges the clerical politics of Barsetshire, the legal questions raised by the family's settlements, and the social problem of money made in trade. The idea for the plot came from Trollope's brother Thomas.