Author Description

Trilby is a novel by George du Maurier and one of the most popular novels of its time. Published serially in Harper's Monthly from January to August 1894, it was published in book form on 8 September 1895 and sold 200,000 copies in the United States alone.[1] Trilby is set in the 1850s in an idyllic bohemian Paris. The late nineteenth century novelist George Gissing read the "notorious" novel in May 1896 with "scant satisfaction".[2] Though Trilby features the stories of two English artists and a Scottish artist, one of the most memorable characters is Svengali, a rogue, masterful musician and hypnotist.Trilby O'Ferrall, the novel's heroine, is a half-Irish girl working in Paris as an artists' model and laundress; all the men in the novel are in love with her. The relationship between Trilby and Svengali forms only a small, though crucial, portion of the novel, which is mainly an evocation of a milieu.