Framley Parsonage
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Framley Parsonage is the fourth of Anthony Trollope's "Barsetshire" series of novels, and was first published in serial form in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860.
The hero, Mark Robarts, is a young vicar, newly arrived in the village of Framley in Barsetshire. This "living" has come into his hands through Lady Lufton the mother of his childhood friend Lord Ludovic Lufton. Mark has ambitions to further his career and begins to seek connections in the county’s high society. He is soon preyed upon by the local MP Mr Sowerby to guarantee a substantial loan, which Mark in a moment of weakness agrees to even though he does not have the means to fund it and knows Sowerby to be a notorious debtor. The consequences of this debt play a major thread in the plot with Mark eventually being publicly humiliated at the hands of bailiffs.
Another plot line is the love torn events of Mark's sister, Lucy, and Lord Ludovic. The couple are deeply in love and Ludovic proposes marriage but Lady Lufton is against the marriage fearing Lucy is the wrong class for such an honour.
Lucy’s conduct and charity (especially as expressed towards the family of poor curate Josiah Crawley) eventually make her ladyship relent.
Ludovic helps Mark to escape from the debt into which he has fallen.
The book ends with Lucy and Ludovic’s marriage as well as three other marriages of minor characters. Two of these are the marriages of the daughters of Bishop Proudie and Archdeacon Grantley. The rivalry between Mrs Proudie and the Archdeacon's wife over their matrimonial ambitions for their daughters forms a significant comic subplot. The other marriage is that of the outspoken heiress, Martha Dunstable, to Doctor Thorne, the eponymous hero of the preceding novel in the series.