Scholars are always fossicking around in libraries and emerging with the original manuscripts of novels supposedly superior to the mangled versions subsequently created by dimwitted editors. In 2000, for example, Matthew J. Bruccoli and his wife, Arlyn, convinced themselves that the suitcase-sized version of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” was better before Maxwell Perkins did us all a favor and took his scissors to it. But now, just in time for the bicentennial of Trollope’s birth, there is a new, restored version of his 1880 novel “The Duke’s Children,” assembled by a team of researchers led by Steven Amarnick, who went back to the original manuscript in Yale’s Beinecke Library, and it really is better, even if for the time being it’s only available in a deluxe Folio Society edition — the kind of book, slipcased, gilded, finely bound, that’s so grand you’re a little embarrassed to be seen with it.

The editor responsible for the truncated version was none other than Trollope himself. He didn’t like cutting any better than the next writer, but agreed to it presumably at the request of Dickens’s son Charley, who in 1879 published “The Duke’s Children,” the sixth and last of Trollope’s Palliser novels, in nine months of weekly installments in his magazine All the Year Round. The last volume in the Palliser series, “The Prime Minister,” had sold poorly, Trollope’s reputation in general was in decline, and he may have felt he had no choice. He spent two months on the editing job, or almost a third as long as it took him to write the book in the first place, and he took out some 65,000 words, or close to a quarter of the total. The result, in its way, is a marvel of care and obsession. Trollope didn’t hack, he didn’t streamline or abridge the plot, or eliminate any characters or chapters. Sometimes he excised whole paragraphs, but more often he combed out a phrase or a line or two, and sometimes for one word he substituted another that was shorter by a letter.

“The Duke’s Children” is a novel about sorrow and loss, and about a parent’s pained discovery that our children inevitably grow to love us less than we love them. In the first sentence Trollope kills off Lady Glencora, his most lovable female character, leaving her husband, Plantagenet, a rigid, humorless man whom she had thawed to life, diminished and bereft. Her absence is felt on every page, and one of Trollope’s oddest cuts is a poignant passage that makes explicit Palliser’s sense of desertion and bewilderment. Palliser has to cope alone now with his three grown children, and each is a disappointment. Silverbridge, the oldest and heir to the vast Palliser fortune, is kicked out of Oxford for painting the dean’s house red; loses a prodigious sum betting on horse racing; enters Parliament not on his father’s side, the Liberals, but as a Tory; and gets engaged to an American heiress. His younger brother, Gerald, also gets expelled from college and runs up debts he can’t pay — on cards, not horses. And Mary, Palliser’s favorite child, declares herself to be in love with a man named Frank Tregear, who is not a fortune hunter, exactly, just someone who has no money and no inclination to earn any.

By trying to interfere, Palliser only makes things worse, as is usually the case with parental intervention, and Silverbridge and Mary ultimately have their way. The novel is really the story of Palliser’s compromise with necessity. It ends — Trollope’s edited version, that is — with his acceptance and even a certain admiration of Tregear. But the original version concludes very differently, with Gerald insisting that it’s his turn next, and that after all that’s happened with his siblings his father must let him have his “own way, whatever it is.” Possibly Trollope had meant to open the door for yet another installment in the series and then decided to cut this after concluding that there would be no more Palliser novels. Yet the earlier, more open-ended version seems less solemn and more fitting — an acknowledgment that in family life nothing is ever permanently settled.