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Dr Wortle's School
Dr Wortle's School
Nov 24, 2025 6:11 PM

Author:Anthony Trollope,Mick Imlah,Mick Imlah,Mick Imlah

Dr Wortle's School

Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the blackmailing brother of her first husband - a reprobate from Louisiana - appears at the school gates, a dreadful secret is revealed and the county is scandalized. Ostracised by the community, the pair seem trapped in a hopeless situation - until the combative but warm-hearted headmaster of the school, Dr Wortle, offers his support, and Mr Peacocke embarks upon a journey to America that he hopes will lay to rest the accusations once and for all. A perceptive exploration of Victorian morality, Dr Wortle's School (1881) also contains echoes of Trollope's own life, and his personal affection for the vivacious Bostonian Kate Field.

Reviews

She is a brilliant story teller, The Lymond Chronicles will keep you reading late into the night, desperate to know the fate of the characters you have come to care deeply about.

—— The Times Literary Supplement

Melodrama of the most magnificent kind

—— The Guardian

[A] remarkable book, in which the realist and the dreamer are finally and excitingly fused

—— New York Times

A meditation, in the form of a novel, on the connection between life and art, by a talented Australian writer

—— Washington Post

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

—— Terry Eagleton , Stand

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

—— Colb Toibin , Sunday Independent

‘Morrison’s legacy in commemorating slavery’s survivors will endure and uplift for centuries to come'

—— Aminatta Forna

‘Her every word a caress, her every sentence an embrace, her every paragraph, a cupping of her hands around our faces that said: I know you, I see you, we are together’

—— Jesmyn Ward

‘I have never read anyone else like her . . . She was an opener of doors, doors that seemed they might always be shut, doors shut so tight they seemed not to be doors at all’

—— Mohsin Hamid

‘Her legacy is total excellence . . . she is magnificent, her emotional intelligence is second to none and her bravery was equal to her artistry’

—— Kwame Kwei-Armah

‘Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the twentieth century’

—— Caryl Phillips

‘[Toni Morrison’s] irreverence was godly’

—— Guardian

A beautiful book and it's beautifully written

—— Kit de Waal , Good Housekeeping UK

My favourite book of all time

—— Sareeta Domingo , Good Housekeeping

Morrison's stunning trilogy is an evocation of black life over the past four centuries. It defies summary. Completed almost 25 years ago, these novels top anything produced by any American writer including Hemingway, Updike and DeLillo

—— Trevor Phillips , Sunday Times

[A] beautiful, haunting novel

—— Stig Abell , Sunday Times

More than one of Morrison's books could be classed as masterpieces, but this one is famous for a reason: everyone should read it

—— Bernice McFadden, author of SUGAR , Guardian
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