I have to say that I'm surprised by Anthony Trollope. Can You Forgive Her? isn't the novel I expected it to be. Perhaps reading Dickens so recently has skewed my understanding of what mid-Victorian literature is like; his irresistibly grotesque characters and depth of scene has led me to assume certain things about his contemporaries. Similarly, what I know of Eliot and the Sensationalists has affected my view of the period's literary landscape. All of these writers, even when they're writing retrospectively, feel very contemporary in their context, flush up against the backdrop of the 1850s and 1860s. In contrast Can You Forgive Her? reminds me of nothing if not a Regency period piece, a less witty, more wordy Austen novel of manners in which characters 'would break their hearts' at a cruel word and aunts and mothers spend their lives in pursuit of eligible beaus for their young charges. Admittedly, the themes are mid-Victorian - the place and function of women; the role of love in marriage; the slow demise of the squireocracy - but the execution is decidedly earlier in style.
Which isn't to say I don't like it. I like it a lot, particularly now it has gotten going. Trollope has an annoying habit of butting in on proceedings at first, opening chapters with distracting asides about what will and will not interest the reader (for example, we apparently couldn't care less about the six weeks our heroine spends in Switzerland with her cousins), and giving his opinion of the place of action (he doesn't like Yarmouth at all). These interjections remind me a little of Walter Scott's playful editorialising in Waverley, but Trollope is too perfunctory to be charming and ends up seeming abrupt and impatient, like a debut writer who can't think how to move their action along. Trollope is best when he lets his characters do the talking - the dialogue is fluid and believable - and when he digs his heels into the Austen-esque and gently lampoons the behaviour of his auxiliary actors.
Thus far we have met our heroine, Alice Vavasour, a young woman not quite in the 'Upper Ten Thousand of this, our English world' but possessed of 'high' relatives and £400 a year independent of her family. Aged twenty-four as the action opens, she is attractive, high-spirited and already engaged to be married to the respectable and gentlemanly Mr. Gray. However, it quickly becomes clear that all is not well between the lovers - Alice declines to set a date for their nuptials, while Mr. Gray is increasingly impatient to meet her at the altar. Like the reader, he has probably guessed that her heart lies elsewhere, with her 'wild' cousin, George Vavasour. Now, it must be admitted,that George doesn't qualify as 'wild' by most modern standards. He gambled a little in his youth, and once knocked down his business partner in a fit of rage, but recently his only crime has been to run for parliament as a Radical and spend a little too much money on his campaign. It isn't surprising that his younger sister has difficulty understanding his bad reputation.
I chose Can You Forgive Her? as my first foray into Trollope on the basis of its reputation as a novel on the 'Woman Question', and I haven't been disappointed so far. From the start the plot is engaged with the central dilemma of the day - what is a woman supposed to do with her life? - and features female characters at different stages in answering it. One of the most interesting is Kate Vavasour, Alice's cousin and George's sister. Already on her way to spinsterhood at the age of 30, she is independent and caustically intelligent, seeing through the machinations of her match-making aunt, Mrs Greenow, and the clumsy advances of Mr Cheesacre, her brusque suitor. She disdains the idea of marriage for herself, but at the same time is vulnerable, both emotionally and financially. It is difficult to know what Trollope thinks of her at the moment (or of Alice, for that matter). I have a sneaky feeling she is 'redeemed' in his eyes through the devotion she feels towards her brother, a loyalty so pathological as to almost contradict the strength in the rest of her character. George is almost figured as a husband for her, a man for whom she can subjugate her own desires and needs - at one point she even says to Alice that she feels she is married to him. I've yet to decide whether her feelings are verging on the incestuous, but either way she promises to be interesting. I'm sure that, in the end, I'll be disappointed in Trollope's solution to the 'woman question', but I suppose that is only to be expected and it is what he reveals along the way about mid-Victorian values and assumptions that matters.
Does anyone know if films or series have been made of Trollope's novels? I can't remember ever having heard of any.
~~Victoria~~