"I don't see why handsome men should not be run after as much as handsome women."
"But you wouldn't have a girl run after any man, would you, whether handsome or ugly?"
"But they do, you know."
-- Lady Glencora Palliser and Miss Alice Vavasor tell it like it is in Can You Forgive Her? (p. 593-594)
Can You Forgive Her? (1865), the first of Trollope's famous Palliser series of novels, was a bit of a slow starter for me. Once I'd gotten about a fourth of the way through, though, it got faster and faster, and eventually I was reading it in every spare moment until it was done. There are many characters whose thoughts and feelings we are privy to, descriptions of social life and customs, and a whole lot about British politics. The main focus, however, settles on two young women, thwarted and frustrated by their limited options in life, in vaguely similar love triangles.
Financially and morally self-sufficient Alice Vavasor first jilts a handsome, eligible suitor, convinced their temperaments are too far apart for them to be happy. Then, wanting to feel useful and involve herself in politics, she gets drawn into a new engagement with her previous fiance, a cousin with bad money sense and a bad temper, who wants her small fortune to help him run for Parliament. Her friend, Lady Glencora, was torn from her gorgeous but dissipated first love and pressured into marrying a perfectly fine, but somewhat boring husband, with whom she is mostly miserable, especially when that first love turns up again.
While the narrator seems to think the reader might not forgive Alice for her indecisiveness, breaking up with multiple fiances, modern audiences are probably less likely to forgive her angst about it. When she realizes she doesn't love cousin George, she can just break it off! Why all the punctilio?
It's unladylike for a woman to express her feelings, since she mustn't be perceived as a sexual aggressor; it's ungentlemanly for a man to express his feelings, since he is expected to maintain an air of stoic reserve. Under the circumstances, it's difficult for a couple to gauge their compatibility before marriage, and both heroines think men don't love them, who really do. Given that every aspect of her future life hinges on her choice of husband, Alice's vacillation is understandable. Even with more freedom and more options, it's hard for people to know what they really want.
As everyone knows, I am particularly interested in novels about women's lives in prior eras, and the problems facing even the most privileged women in the 19th century are richly detailed here. The overall effect might not be as obviously subversive as that of other writers (even other male ones like Wilkie Collins and J. Sheridan LeFanu), but Trollope gives his women way more agency and insight into their situations than I had expected.
On that subject, I could quote all day. Alice, defined by almost everyone she meets as the sum of her marriage prospects, is told by her closest friend, "It is you that ought to be Chancellor of the Exchequer" (591). Lady Glencora, thought so childlike by her husband, is described by the narrator as "in many things ... much quicker, much more clever, than her husband" (414), and "I do not know that she was at all points a lady, but had Fate so willed it she would have been a thorough gentleman" (473).
Glencora herself, about to scandalously place a bet at a German casino, expresses her situation with poignant eloquence. "I'll tell you what I want, -- something to live for, -- some excitement ... I'd go and sit out there, and drink beer and hear the music, only Plantagenet wouldn't let me" (653). Most women today take for granted that they can drink beer and listen to music if they want to, but it wasn't that way a hundred years before I was born.
She goes on, "There are moments when I almost make up my mind to go headlong to the devil, -- when I think it is the best thing to be done ... A man can take to drinking and gambling and all the rest of it, and nobody despises him a bit ... All he wants is money, and he goes away and has fling. Now I have plenty of money ... and I never got my fling yet. I do feel so tempted to rebel, and go ahead, and care for nothing" (654-655).
I took a side trip from Can You Forgive Her? to read a little collection of Trollope's holiday stories, Christmas as Thompson Hall, and discovered that he it isn't just this book: he clearly had an interest in the imp of the perverse, and the big problems that could arise from seemingly small communication gaps. Once I get caught up on some more Classics Club reads, I hope to revisit Trollope. Maybe the Barchester series!
Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her? London: Vintage Books, 2012.
"But you wouldn't have a girl run after any man, would you, whether handsome or ugly?"
"But they do, you know."
-- Lady Glencora Palliser and Miss Alice Vavasor tell it like it is in Can You Forgive Her? (p. 593-594)
Can You Forgive Her? (1865), the first of Trollope's famous Palliser series of novels, was a bit of a slow starter for me. Once I'd gotten about a fourth of the way through, though, it got faster and faster, and eventually I was reading it in every spare moment until it was done. There are many characters whose thoughts and feelings we are privy to, descriptions of social life and customs, and a whole lot about British politics. The main focus, however, settles on two young women, thwarted and frustrated by their limited options in life, in vaguely similar love triangles.
Financially and morally self-sufficient Alice Vavasor first jilts a handsome, eligible suitor, convinced their temperaments are too far apart for them to be happy. Then, wanting to feel useful and involve herself in politics, she gets drawn into a new engagement with her previous fiance, a cousin with bad money sense and a bad temper, who wants her small fortune to help him run for Parliament. Her friend, Lady Glencora, was torn from her gorgeous but dissipated first love and pressured into marrying a perfectly fine, but somewhat boring husband, with whom she is mostly miserable, especially when that first love turns up again.
While the narrator seems to think the reader might not forgive Alice for her indecisiveness, breaking up with multiple fiances, modern audiences are probably less likely to forgive her angst about it. When she realizes she doesn't love cousin George, she can just break it off! Why all the punctilio?
It's unladylike for a woman to express her feelings, since she mustn't be perceived as a sexual aggressor; it's ungentlemanly for a man to express his feelings, since he is expected to maintain an air of stoic reserve. Under the circumstances, it's difficult for a couple to gauge their compatibility before marriage, and both heroines think men don't love them, who really do. Given that every aspect of her future life hinges on her choice of husband, Alice's vacillation is understandable. Even with more freedom and more options, it's hard for people to know what they really want.
As everyone knows, I am particularly interested in novels about women's lives in prior eras, and the problems facing even the most privileged women in the 19th century are richly detailed here. The overall effect might not be as obviously subversive as that of other writers (even other male ones like Wilkie Collins and J. Sheridan LeFanu), but Trollope gives his women way more agency and insight into their situations than I had expected.
On that subject, I could quote all day. Alice, defined by almost everyone she meets as the sum of her marriage prospects, is told by her closest friend, "It is you that ought to be Chancellor of the Exchequer" (591). Lady Glencora, thought so childlike by her husband, is described by the narrator as "in many things ... much quicker, much more clever, than her husband" (414), and "I do not know that she was at all points a lady, but had Fate so willed it she would have been a thorough gentleman" (473).
Glencora herself, about to scandalously place a bet at a German casino, expresses her situation with poignant eloquence. "I'll tell you what I want, -- something to live for, -- some excitement ... I'd go and sit out there, and drink beer and hear the music, only Plantagenet wouldn't let me" (653). Most women today take for granted that they can drink beer and listen to music if they want to, but it wasn't that way a hundred years before I was born.
She goes on, "There are moments when I almost make up my mind to go headlong to the devil, -- when I think it is the best thing to be done ... A man can take to drinking and gambling and all the rest of it, and nobody despises him a bit ... All he wants is money, and he goes away and has fling. Now I have plenty of money ... and I never got my fling yet. I do feel so tempted to rebel, and go ahead, and care for nothing" (654-655).
I took a side trip from Can You Forgive Her? to read a little collection of Trollope's holiday stories, Christmas as Thompson Hall, and discovered that he it isn't just this book: he clearly had an interest in the imp of the perverse, and the big problems that could arise from seemingly small communication gaps. Once I get caught up on some more Classics Club reads, I hope to revisit Trollope. Maybe the Barchester series!
Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her? London: Vintage Books, 2012.
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