Politics and sport colour and dominate a large proportion of the novels belonging to the _Can You Forgive Her?_ period. For the personal studies those works implied, author and artist alike found all they wanted during their summer visits to Millais’ Highland home, or in the autumn at the Kent or Wiltshire shooting-box of Henry James. Here they collected representatives of the polite world in all its aspects of pleasure or business, from the heir apparent to the latest Junior Lord of the Admiralty and the most recent importation in the way of popular sportsmen or reigning beauties from the other side of the Atlantic.
Later on, Trollope occasionally induced Millais to witness the hounds throw off in those East Anglian pastures where he had placed the Roebury Club’s headquarters, to which the author of _Can You Forgive Her?_ had wished personally to introduce his illustrator. The similarity of Millais’ and Trollope’s methods now considered will be best understood from a concrete instance. Of the artist’s academy paintings in 1887, one was reproduced as a coloured supplement to _The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News_ by the name of “Portia.” Without being exactly a portrait, the painting, like the coloured engraving after it, recalled to every one a well-known man’s pretty daughter who had then just come out. This young lady, indeed, had never sat to the artist; but she had given him unconsciously the central idea for his work, into which, during its progress, he introduced features or touches, whose suggestion came to him from other faces.
So was it exactly with the creations of Trollope’s pen in their companionship with those of Millais’ pencil. The literary period which, actually opening with _Orley Farm_, produced nothing so significant of Trollope’s advance in his craft and in his views of feminine character, as _Can You Forgive Her?_ This was published in 1864. Much of it, however, had been written some years previously, even so far back as when the stories that first established him in favour with every class were the great attraction of _The Cornhill_. We have already seen how many manor houses and parsonages disputed with each other in the alleged possession of the originals from whom the novelist had drawn Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and their belongings. Trollope’s creative power reached its height as he approached early middle age. His Post Office rounds, throughout the whole country south of the Trent, had acquainted him first-hand with every phase of womanhood, from sweet seventeen to full-blown and flirting forty. Were some readers beginning to talk about a satiety of bread and butter misses? _Orley Farm_ had at least reminded such critics of its author’s capacity to be something more than the prose laureate of virginal varieties like those to be met with in every English village during the sixties beneath the manor or the parsonage roof. _Can You Forgive Her?_ realised the higher expectations first raised by _Orley Farm_ as to the literary results that might be produced by the bolder conceptions of the sex, the broader and deeper outlook upon the tragi-comedy of daily life that Trollope had begun to exhibit.