Knox was well-positioned to write a book like this: close enough to Trollope's world to still have a real sense of what it was like, though coloured by a glow of nostalgia which is absent from Trollope (the world of Barsetshire was already on its way out when Trollope wrote, but he is less sentimentally attached to it): the children of the Barsetshire protagonists would have been the generation of Knox's father.

It is not Trollope, though; it is Knox. Trollope was a layman who si times wrote about clerical matters (and clerical matters as an aspect of politics); Knox was an Anglican bishop's son and a Roman Monsignor. There are many more RCs in Knox's Barsetshire (easy to do, as I recall none in Trollope's) and inter-eccesial tensions are a theme developed by Knox which are entirely absent from Trollope. The Higher Criticism, which did not interest Trollope at all, plays a role in one story.

There are points when it feels clever, as Trollope rarely does.

Still, Knox does well at capturing the humane character of the Barsetshire milieu and pulling it forward into the 20th Century; one can with a little effort, feel that it might be authentic, in a way which fails completely in so many continuations of Nineteenth-Century novels. ( )