Orley Farm is a novel written in the realist mode by Anthony Trollope (1815–82), and illustrated by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais (1829–96).

Although this novel appeared to have undersold (possibly because the shilling part was being overshadowed by magazines, such as The Cornhill, that offered a variety of stories and poems in each issue), Orley Farm became Trollope's personal favourite.

[3] Trollope's arrangement with Chapman and Hall was that he would receive £125 for each of the monthly parts, a sum of £2,500, with an additional half interest in each copy sold after the first 10,000.

The prosecution fails, but Lady Mason later confesses privately that she committed the forgery, and is prompted by conscience to give up the estate.

The main one deals with a slowly unfolding romance between Felix Graham (a young and relatively poor barrister without family) and Madeline Staveley, daughter of Judge Stavely of Noningsby.

Against a vast panorama of carefully depicted human types and their relationships, the basic themes are guilt (the different manifestations of its acknowledgment by Mary Mason and by her son), revenge (its nature and reasons as indulged in by Joseph Mason and by Samuel Dockwrath), suffering (by the guilty party herself and by others who love her), and love/hate (their respective presence or absence in individual characters among the Ormes, the Staverleys, the Furnivals, Felix Graham, and Mary Snow).

Similarly, a comic minor character, Mr. Moulder, defends Lady Mason's acquittal thus: "If a jury of her countrymen doesn't make a woman innocent, what does?

"[4] A darker theme, also seen in Trollope's other books such as Castle Richmond and Framley Parsonage, is that the changing Victorian world often brought anguish and disillusionment to those who had started out with great advantages.

He continues by admitting, "When Lady Mason tells Sir Peregrine that she did forge the will, the plot of Orley Farm has unraveled itself; – and this she does in the middle of the tale."