three volumes rather than the two that he had intended. In his Autobiography, Trollope reported receiving a total of £1757 for The Belton Estate. Of this sum £800 came from the Fortnightly, and another £700 from Chapman & Hall for the first 2,000 copies. In 1865–66, the novel was serialised in the American Littell's Living Age. It was published in book form in 1866 by Lippincott of Philadelphia, by Harper in New York, and by Tauchnitz in Leipzig. In 1867, it was serialised in French in the Revue Nationale as L'Heritage des Belton, and a Dutch translation, Het Huis Belton, was published in two volumes by Brast of Dordrecht. In 1871, a Russian translation was issued in St. Petersburg under the title Beltonskoy Pomesti; in 1875, Hachette of Paris released a new French translation as La Domaine de Belton. More recently, an edition with an introduction by John Halperin was published in 1923; it was re-released in paperback by Oxford University Press in 1986. In 1991, the Trollope Society released an edition with an introduction by David Skilton. Reception Trollope himself was apparently unimpressed by his work on the novel. In his 1883 autobiography, he wrote: "It is readable, and contains scenes which are true to life; but it has no peculiar merits, and will add nothing to my reputation as a novelist." Contemporary critics responded negatively to the work. Reviews in the Athenaeum, the Spectator, and the Saturday Review all expressed disappointment. Henry James was particularly scathing, describing the novel as "a work written for children; a work prepared for minds unable to think". The Belton Estate has since received rather more favourable critical attention. Halperin describes it as "one of [Trollope's] most undervalued novels"; he suggests that this is because it was published at a time when Trollope was quickly putting out some of his finest works: "it got, almost literally, lost." Michael Sadleir considered it among Trollope’s five most technically accomplished novels; and (contradicting James) saw it as a skilled triumph of art concealing art. Feminist literary criticism has approvingly noted the novel’s quietly feminist narrator; its undercutting of sexual double standards; and its rejection of conventional Victorian views of femininity. References External links The Belton Estate—easy-to-read HTML version at University of Adelaide Library The Belton Estate at Project Gutenberg Novels by Anthony Trollope 1865 British novels Works originally published in The Fortnightly Review Novels first published