Lizzie Eustace has a diamond necklace worth ten thousand pounds, and the question of whether it was hers to keep occupies the courts, the family lawyers, two suitors and all of London. Trollope wrote before breakfast, by his watch, 250 words a quarter-hour; here he built a whole novel around a woman who lies as she breathes, and then refused to let the law be simple about it. The lawyers' opinions are the funniest thing he ever wrote. Fifty plates of Georgian and Victorian portraiture, from Hogarth to Martineau, give faces to the world of lawyers, ladies and disputed property that Trollope's novel dissects.
