Interest in the Æsthetic School, of which he was already the acknowledged master, had sometime previously spread to the United States, and it is said that the production of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, “Patience,”[1] in which he and his disciples were held up to ridicule, determined him to pay a visit to the States to give some lectures explaining what he meant by Æstheticism, hoping thereby to interest, and possibly to instruct and elevate our transatlantic cousins. He set sail on board the “Arizona” on Saturday, December 24th, 1881, arriving in New York early in the following year. On landing he was bombarded by journalists eager to interview the distinguished stranger. “Punch,” in its issue of January 14th, in a happy vein, parodied these interviewers, the most amusing passage in which referred to “His Glorious Past,” wherein Wilde was made to say, “Precisely—I took the Newdigate. Oh! no doubt, every year some man gets the Newdigate; but not every year does Newdigate get an Oscar.”

    The stories collected here show a writer of extraordinary range, in subject matter, narrative device, and tone. With the companion volume, Early Short Stories, they offer readers a complete set of Trollope's hard-to-find shorter fiction.

    Serialised in 1882 and then published in full form in 1883 by the House of Blackwood, The Ladies Lindores is a frank appraisal of the politics and pressures laid on the Lindores women who are expected to conform to the Victorian ideology of female acquiescence but who stand on the cusp of emancipation.Having endured five years of an arranged and oppressive marriage, Caroline ('Carry') Lindores ecstatically embraces her sudden freedom but finds that her path to obtaining deep and lasting happiness is still riddled with difficulties. Her sister, Edith, faced with parental pressure to marry a rich and titled suitor whom she does not love, similarly finds her principles put to the test. Their mother, Mary, further estranged from her ambitious husband and increasingly perplexed by her children, questions the very nature of marriage itself.Written in the later years of her literary career, Oliphant's The Ladies Lindores is a realistic comment on the struggles of the authentic and loyal heart against the calculating coldness of personal promotion and avarice."