The Chronicle of Barsetshire presents the life of Anthony Trollope, who, although perhaps best known for his popular novels of Victorian English life, was also a prolific writer of nonfiction and a distinguished civil servant. R. H. Super, professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, has drawn upon a wide range of primary sources, archival as well as published, to give a complete sense of the man, his variety of talents, his place in the intellectual world of nineteenth-century England, and the interplay between his fiction and the events of his life. It is a biography of the highest merit, a work that, unlike the previous studies of Trollope's life, is not overshadowed by Trollope's own colorful (but frequently inaccurate) Autobiography. Exhaustive in its portrayal of Trollope's long, productive life, and impeccable in its scholarship, The Chronicler of Barsetshire sets a new standard of execellence in Trollopian studies.

R. H. Super (1914–2010) was a distinguished historian and biographer renowned for his contributions to Victorian literature studies. He served as a professor of English at the University of Michigan, and was the editor of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold.