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Ayala's Angel |
[Published April 1989] |
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Ayala's Angel Introduction by Alice Thomas Ellis 532 pages Ayala's Angel stands out among Trollope's novels for its lightness of touch and its light-hearted, sunny atmosphere. It tells the story of the orphan daughters of a charming, feckless artist, Egbert Dormer, who dies leaving no inheritance at all to his two attractive girls except their looks, and the innocent confidence bestowed by their family's improvident Bohemian lifestyle. Two quite different branches of the family come to the rescue. They are united on only one point. The girls must be separated. The more spectacular of the two, Ayala, is to live a life of luxury with rich cousins, the Tringles. Her quieter sister Lucy is incarcerated in the gloomy suburban fortress of the Dosett family where, it is made plain, her presence is felt to be an extra burden on a fragile household economy. It takes girls of some spirit to survive such ordeals. Ayala's misfortune is that the callow Tom Tringle falls for her. When Ayala complains to Lady Tringle that she is being pestered, Lady Emmeline's latent dislike of this attractive girl with her unsuitable back ground rapidly surfaces. 'I suppose you have encouraged him'. 'He is a lout: a stupid lout. I have not encouraged him'. 'Ayala, you are very impertinent'. 'And you are very unjust. I want to put a stop to it. I come to you, and you tell me that I encourage him. You are worse than Augusta'. The result of the ensuing row is that the girls are not re-united, but -- incredibly -- swapped: exchanged like unsuitable dresses. Brainless luxury is inflicted on Lucy: cheese-paring penance on Ayala. Trollope elegantly demonstrates that neither of these ways of living is tolerable. The girls, remarkably uncrushable, contrive their own solutions. Lucy's pursuit of a penniless young sculptor is successful, at last, despite the ill-fitting trammels of luxury thrown round her. While Ayala's frantic search for an 'Angel of Light' eventually reaches fruition in a love match with an ugly, witty, authoritarian Colonel with red hair, who offers her sanctuary in the civilised world of the English Gentleman: a world vastly superior to the bogus versions she has rejected before. Publication Price: £35.00/$70.00. |
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Dr Whortle's School Introduction by Dr John Rae 199 pages 'The Revd Jeffrey Wortle, DD, was a man much esteemed by others and by himself'. So Trollope introduces us in the opening sentence of this novel to its most important character. Dr Wortle combines the profession of a successful private schoolmaster with the normal parishional duties of a parson. No doubt it is that comfortable extra income which gives him the robust spirit of independence which imbues all his dealings with the successive Bishops of Broughton; of whom he has a low opinion. As the novel starts, he has been looking, in order to enlarge his school, for a qualified, competent married assistant: and by a stroke of luck, one comes his way from five years' teaching in America, equipped with impeccable credentials from Oxford; and a beautiful American wife. Or so it seems. For the only thing wrong with this paragon of a couple is that man and wife they are not. Bluntly, in the middle of the third chapter, Trollope tells us so. Our interest is to lie in the way the Doctor and his wife, the Bishop, and the boys' parents react to what is first an ugly rumour and then is taken to be fact. Scandal spreads; newspaper reports fan the flames; and the school slowly empties of its pupils. But Dr Wortle remains loyal to the Peacockes, though threatened with financial ruin. Even when he is forced to contemplate closing his school altogether, he cannot compromise. 'Will it make you very unhappy?' asks his wife. 'No doubt it will', replies he, 'a man does not like to fail'. The denouement, like so many of Trollope's plots, is wrapped in the mysteries of bigamy and legitimacy in foreign parts. Trollope wrote this novel in a comfortable rented country rectory. His surviving letters suggest the august setting not only induced him to imagine himself as a real Rector, dealing with titles, and parishioners and Bishops and curates, but to give us something very close to his own version of a self-portrait. Publication Price: £26.50/$53.00 |
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The Belton Estate Introduction by Professor David Skilton 365 pages The Belton Estate is vintage Trollope, and possibly the subtlest of his novels. Written in 1865 and published in book form the following year, it tells the deceptively simple tale of Clara Amedroz. Following the suicide of her worthless brother and the death of her neurotic father, the entail of her home - the eponymous Belton Estate - passes to a distant cousin, the farmer Will Belton. Rejecting his impetuous proposal of marriage in favour of the MP, Captain Aylmer, Clara finds that the man she has chosen is, though a gentleman, both dull and unimaginative; worse still, he has a mother who is demanding and overbearing: 'There is nothing so irritating to an engaged young lady as counsel from her intended husband's mamma.' Clara's courage and indomitability help her to survive a difficult (and amusing) confrontation with her intended mother-in-law, which points up the central theme of the book: the obstacles facing a young girl, without fortune or property, on her path towards a happy and successful marriage; and the dependence such a girl has upon her prospective husband. This notion of dependence, and the difficulties of being a woman in a world made by men is mirrored elsewhere in the novel. Clara's aunt, Mrs Winterfield, is expected to leave her fortune to her niece; yet she misguidedly bequeaths it instead to the indifferent Captain Aylmer after extracting a promise from him that he will marry Clara. The intention is uncompromising: the Captain will manage the money and Clara. And there are the Askertons, friends of Clara who live in a cottage on the estate. They have to endure social ostracism and malicious gossip because they left India together before Mary Askerton, previously married to a drunkard, was free to marry again: they went against convention. The story of The Belton Estate is subtly explored. Trollope was writing about real people and ordinary lives: there are no pantomime scoundrels, no melodramatic developments. The novel is an attack - albeit of the gentlest kind - on dull acceptance of conventional mores, explored through the eyes of the independent Clara. Publication Price:£27.00/$54.00 |
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The Three Clerks Introduction by Jack Hall 539 pages The Three Clerks was Trollope's sixth novel and was written mostly in railway carriages, since his work for the Post Office still entailed a good deal of travelling; to make life easier for himself, Trollope had devised what he called his 'tablet', a square block which he rested upon his knees in such a way that he could write in complete comfort. The story is drawn from his memories of his work (as a clerk) at the GPO in St Martin-le-Grand, and Richard Mullen has called it the most autobiographical of Trollope's novels. The plot concerns three civil servants, Henry Norman and the cousins Alaric and Charley Tudor. They are involved with the three daughters of a clergyman's widow, Mrs Woodward. The shy and reserved Henry, the eldest of the three friends, falls in love with the eldest daughter (Gertrude), but she rejects his advances and marries Alaric Tudor instead: this proves a slightly unfortunate choice when Alaric is tried and imprisoned for embezzlement. However, Gertrude stands by him, and the couple emigrate with their two sons to Australia when his six-month sentence is over: meanwhile, the embittered Henry finds true happiness with the second Woodward daughter. The third of the clerks, however, is a different proposition altogether. The character of Charley Tudor has long been claimed as an autobiographical portrait of Trollope, 'in his hobbledehoy days'. Certainly Charley's entrance examination to the Internal Navigation Office is very reminiscent of Trollope's on entering the Post Office. Charley Tudor makes bad friends and adopts bad manners and habits in the process; nonetheless, the youngest Woodward daughter, Katie, falls in love with Charley despite the opposition of her mother; however, a suitably Trollopian twist of fate lies in store for her... Trollope sent the novel to his mother in Italy, and from there it made its way to the home of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; she read it with great enjoyment, but reported in a letter that the grave illness Katie Woodward faces in the third volume of the novel 'wrung [her] to tears'. (Trollope himself always cried when he read this particular section). She concluded: 'My husband, who can seldom get a novel to hold him, has been held by this....what a thoroughly man's book it is!' The Three Clerks was published in 1858, and is also notable - to Trollope afficionados - for the first appearance of Mr Chaffanbrass the barrister. Publication Price:£29.50/$59.00 |
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The American Senator Introduction by Louis Auchincloss 513 pages With Arabella Trefoil, Trollope created one of his most formidable and tragic characters. Tall, blonde, beautiful, stately, Arabella is thirty and has been on the marital market for nearly ten years, held there by her dreadful grasping mother Lady Augustus. She is engaged to the stiff civil service diplomat John Morton who becomes the heir to Bragton Hall, an estate of some substance in the Midlands. Its sorry state of repair instills doubts both in Arabella and in her mealy-mouthed mother; doubts compounded by the wealthy Lord Rufford of Rufford Hall, who is altogether a more enticing prospect. In one scene of breathtaking inventiveness, Arabella contrives to arrive for a ball at Rufford Hall ahead of her fiancé's carriage, in order that she may make her customary entrance unattached. The difficulties which Arabella faces lie in her own brutal self-awareness of the facts of life as she perceives them: she has no friends, everyone knows that she is actively seeking a fortune, and she makes little pretence about it. She does not expect love: indeed, it is debatable whether she ever did. Faced with Lord Rufford's considerable wealth, and in the presence of her fiancé, she goes after the aristocrat, narrowly falling at the last hurdle. Arabella's eventual fate is surprising, though anyone familiar with Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust may get some sort of idea: exile. Now for the American Senator of the title. He is something of a lesser character than we are led to expect, except that his is the most frequent presence in the novel. Through his eyes, and from his mouth, we perceive Trollope's sly attitude towards Victorian British hypocrisy. Elias Gotobed's persistent questions about everything British, from social mores to country hunting, pervade this story, and abrade the sensibilities of his hosts. But it is through him that we begin to see Araballa Trefoil, not as the vivacious Lizzie Eustace, nor as the maimed Julia Ongar, but as a tragic, bleached-out object in a shop window, pitiably on permanent display: 'I can't stand this any longer and I won't. What man has to work as I do? ...I never cared much for anybody, and shall never again care at all.' Publication Price:£37.00/$74.00 |
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Miss Mackenzie Introduction by Mary Warnock 330 pages In his Autobiography, Trollope claimed that -- in Miss Mackenzie -- he had attempted a story in which there was 'no love' and that he had made his heroine a 'very unattractive old maid'. Trollope was being slightly disingenuous, and his heroine did indeed fall in love. Miss Mackenzie is almost wholly about one woman's search for love and it is a very moving portrayal of the difficulties facing an unmarried older woman of means. Upon the death of the brother for whom she has cared most of her adult life, and under whose roof she has lived, Margaret Mackenzie finds herself in possession of a good fortune, but with little idea of the world outside, and her place in it. Deciding to rent a small house down in Littlebath, she takes her surviving brother Tom's daughter with her as her ward. Upon arrival she finds a quiet war is going on between the Evangelical Society, led by Mr Stumfold and his imperious wife and the 'sinful set', represented by characters like Miss Todd, a card player. Miss Mackenzie's fortune is immediately a target for several men: her brother's junior partner Mr Rubb, who wears ghastly yellow gloves which make her shudder when he pays a call; her cousin John Ball, a widowed father of seven, who lives with his supercilious parents Lord and Lady Ball in Twickenham; and the oleaginous Mr McGuire, one of the 'Stumfoldians', with a terrifying squint and a curate's income. Miss Mackenzie has to pick a way through this minefield, all the time conscious that she would readily give up her fortune if she can simply find love. In an effort to help her brother, Tom, she has lent his business a large sum of money without security, and finds that she has been misled as to its safety. Further enquiries about this and her own inheritance suddenly unearth legal problems: John Ball appears to be the legitimate heir to her money. Yet he has also a great affection for Margaret and asks her to marry him, much to the consternation of his mother. Mr Maguire, still smarting from Margaret's refusal of his offer of marriage, gets wind of the legal case mounted to determine the fate of her money, and John Ball's hand in it. In the misguided hope of still winning Miss Mackenzie's hand, he publishes a series of long, sanctimonious letters about the case in the Christian Examiner to her profound embarrassment. The novel contains some witty minor characters and scenes, including the proud landlady Mrs Buggins; Margaret's puffed-up sister-in-law, Mrs Tom Mackenzie, who hosts a disastrous dinner party during which nothing goes right; and Margaret's last visit to her uncle and aunt in which Lady Ball behaves as badly as any female character in Trollope's oeuvre. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton thought the book 'full of the most delicate beauty.' Publication Price: £31.00/$62.00 |
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The Claverings Introduction by Max Egremont 478 pageswith 16 original illustrations by Mary Ellen Edwards At the still centre of The Claverings is a minutely observed tragedy of manners, seen through the eyes of the beautiful, selfish Lady Julia Ongar, and the vacillating, arrogant Harry Clavering. Harry is jilted by the then Julia Brabazon with Trollope's customary brutality in the opening paragraphs of the story, being thrown over by her in favour of marriage to the wealthy, dissolute Lord Ongar. Julia and her husband leave for the Continent, while Harry finds solace in a romance and subsequent engagement to Florence Burton, the daughter of his new employer. The whole affair seems comfortably settled; however, Lord Ongar's dissipation abroad leaves Julia a rich widow, but also the subject of (unfounded) rumours about her infidelity -- rumours which originated from her husband. She returns to England, shunned by Society and thus friendless, save for Harry Clavering, who now vacillates hopelessly between his new fiancée and his old Julia, for whom his feelings have revived. The novel is about love and marriage: for Julia the absolute separateness of the two; for Harry their indivisibility. Cleverly, Trollope makes Harry the one who has to choose. He sets the tale both in the country and in London: the huge, uncomfortable Clavering Hall belonging to Harry's uncle Sir Hugh, a sterile household, long since bled dry of any joy; and then London, but a London of seedy gambling houses and the creepy Sophie Gordeloup, who has attached herself leech-like to Lady Julia. She is one of Trollope's best wicked women: perhaps not quite a lady, perhaps not even a Russian spy. The premise is simple: Lady Julia has a considerable income, and several suitors. All they want is her money; all she wants now is happiness, all chance of which she threw away by jilting Harry. The resolution of the novel is subtly ironic, and yet we are left with an unpleasant taste. Not for Trollope the easy solutions of contemporary authors, for in some respects the wrong people are rewarded: there is a certain brutal twentieth century honesty about Lady Julia Ongar which is lacking in the gutless betrayals of Harry Clavering. But Trollope was best at that very thing: writing about women born out of their time. Publication Price: £38.00/$76.00 |
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The Fixed Period Introduction by Graham Handley 154 pages The Fixed Period is narrated in the first person by John Neverbend, and purports to be the memoirs of his time as the first President of Britannula, a fictional island near New Zealand. The story is set in the future, in 1980. A group of elite New Zealanders have set up a colony on the island and have freed themselves from British sovereignty, determined to set up a fair and practical government. One of the major principles advocated and enacted by Neverbend is that of forced euthanasia within the state. The Fixed Period for life is sixty-seven years. During their sixty-seventh year all the citizens must go to a special college where they will be well looked after whilst they prepare for death, which must occur within the year. President Neverbend selects Gabriel Crasweller, a close friend, as the first citizen of the colony to fulfil the demands of the Fixed Period Law; as Trollope points out the irony is that he is in excellent health. As the narrative progresses, Crasweller becomes less and less certain about the principles of the Fixed Period, but cannot back out due to his friendship with the President. Ranged against the fanatical Neverbend are his son Jack, who is set against the Fixed Period mainly because of his love for Eva Crasweller, Gabriel's daughter; and Neverbend's wife Sarah, implacably hostile to the whole principle of euthanasia. Just as Gabriel Crasweller reluctantly agrees to go to the special college prior to his enforced death and is being driven there, a mob of Britannulans surround the carriage and inform the President that a British warship has docked in the port, its powerful guns aimed at the capital, Gladstonopolis. Already unhappy with the Fixed Period law, the citizens happily accede to the wishes of the British, and welcome their new Governor; the Fixed Period law is abolished, whilst Neverbend is taken to England from where he is free to write these, his memoirs. The Fixed Period is one of the curiosities of Trollope's oeuvre. It is his only futuristic novel; it is the only one to be written in the first person; it is also his most obviously satirical work, from the same sly mould which produced Swift's A Modest Proposal. Legend has it that Trollope claimed that what was in the book was 'all true', but in reality what was preoccupying him at the time was his advancing old age. He had just moved house again, to Harting in Petersfield, the book had been written during the bleak winter months, and the slyest joke of all in the text was that Trollope himself was in his sixty-seventh year. The author's thoughts had turned to death and dying, a theme that was reflected again in the central character of his next novel, Mr Scarborough's Family. Publication Price: £25.50/$51.00 |
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An Old Man's Love Introduction by David Skilton 172 pages William Whittlestaff, having lost the woman he loved to a richer, more lively rival many years before, lives alone at Croker Hall in Hampshire, looked after by his loyal, vituperative housekeeper Mrs Baggett. Mr Whittlestaff impulsively takes in as his ward the orphaned daughter of an old friend, nineteen year-old Mary Lawrie, much to Mrs Baggett's disapproval. She - rightly - suspects that Mary's arrival will eventually lead to her master falling in love with the girl, who will supplant her as head of the household. The reserved, unworldly Mary gradually warms towards the lonely bachelor, and he eventually asks her to be his wife. Mary has only briefly experienced love three years before, with John Gordon, a penniless Oxford student who was sent away by her step-mother as a bad prospect. Mary accepts Mr Whittlestaff, but not before making him aware of the history of her short and painful dealings with John Gordon. He dismisses this knowledge, allowing that Mary 'may think of him' from time to time, but privately presuming the young man to be safely out of her life. But John Gordon unexpectedly arrives at Croker Hall. Fresh from the diamond fields of South Africa where he has made a considerable fortune in order to make himself worthy of Mary, he has come to renew his suit, and she finds herself caught in an impossible situation, feeling incapable of jilting the man whose proposal she has so recently accepted. Mr Whittlestaff, though well aware who it is that Mary really loves, is unwilling to be rejected himself once again, and reluctant to release her from her promise. John Gordon, unable quite to give up hope, goes to stay for a few days with an old university friend, Montagu Blake, a curate who lives nearby. The battle is on for the hand of Mary Lawrie. An Old Man's Love is the work of an old author. Although Mr Whittlestaff is far from old -- he is only fifty -- Trollope's portrait of him reflects something of his own sense of having outlived his time. Mr Whittlestaff senses this too, just as he foresees the inevitability of what will happen. Scattered through the book are some sharp and humorous minor character sketches: the outspoken Mrs Baggett, whose waspish tongue hides a deep affection for her employer; her estranged, drunken husband, Sergeant Baggett; the gauche, tactless Mr Blake, blithely ignoring Mr Whittlestaff's pain as he pushes the claims of John Gordon; and the merry, lively Hall family at Alresford, a household which is full of life and youth. Through all of this, William Whittlestaff carefully picks his way towards a decision which, though inevitable, will also quietly break his heart. This was Trollope's last completed work, published posthumously in 1884. Publication Price: £25.50/$51.00 |
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The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson Introduction by Juliet McMaster 176 pages In August 1857, Trollope commenced work on his twelfth novel, just after completing The Three Clerks. His intention, he wrote, was to make a 'hit at the present system of advertising'. He intended it as another part of his campaign against dishonesty in public life, but the novel was virtually abandoned two weeks later. Trollope didn't return to this untypical, unusual venture into the lower middle-class world of the retail trade until 1861, just after he had completed Orley Farm. George Robinson, the youthful narrator of the story, retired butter dealer Mr Brown, and Mr Jones, set up a haberdashery in Bishopsgate street, called Magenta House: 'magenta from the roof to the window tops.' Despite a huge advertising campaign, for which George is responsible, a lack of capital leads the trio into shady dealings and then bankruptcy. George is in love with Maryanne Brown, the daughter of his partner, but Maryane is also the object of another character's affections, William Brisket, a butcher from Aldersgate Street. Brisket will only marry Maryanne with her dowry of £500. When the haberdashery goes bankrupt, George loses Maryanne, who is in turn rejected by the butcher when he discovers that she is now penniless. Matters are further complicated by the discovery that Mr Jones, the third partner, has swindled the other two out of a considerable sum. The irrepressible George Robinson is left at the end as penniless as he began, but determined once again to make his fortune in the world. This is the only novel where Trollope attempts a comic tone throughout, and in attempting this light satire he was also consciously moulding his style on his friend Thackeray's. His narrator George is editing this memoir for publication, but writing about himself in the third person, a distancing device used by Thackeray in works like Henry Esmond, one of Trollope's favourite novels. But his own experimentation with this literary trick does not altogether work. Contemporary critics loathed the book, finding its satire too crude. Trollope himself said of the book that 'it was meant to be funny, was full of slang... but I have heard no-one else express such an opinion.' The Saturday Review certainly didn't: 'A dreadful story ... odiously vulgar and stupid.' But there is always some fun to be found in Trollope, particularly when he was experimenting. The book has its champions: Juliet McMaster points out in her introduction that throughout his career Trollope attempted to experiment, and that 'the hostile chorus seems to me to proceed from some indignation that Trollope should diverge from what they deem to be the true Trollopian path. After The Warden and Barchester Towers, he was expected to go on doing more of the same.' Publication Price: £23.00/$46.00 |
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Rachel Ray Introduction by John Letts 332 pages with frontispiece by John Everett Millais Rachel Ray is a deceptively simple novel. It is simple, in that, like most of Trollope's two volume works, the plot is unencumbered with digressions. The deception lies in its sharing so wholeheartedly the great English preoccupations with sex, class and religion. Indeed, although commissioned by the editor of a religious weekly, it gives us one of the most vivid and realistic studies of the awakening sex drive in a young woman to have been produced in Victorian times. Not surprisingly, The Rev Dr Macleod, the editor of Good Words, dropped it like a hot potato. (It was published instead in book form, and was an instant success). The good Reverend Doctor objected to the author "casting a gloom over Evangelical Societies -- and a glory over balls till 4 in the morning". It must be said that he had a point. The simple part of the plot concerned the widowed Mrs Ray and her two daughters: the young and innocent Rachel, and her repressed (and also widowed) elder sister. Living in genteel poverty, Rachel is taken up by the somewhat parvenu daughters of the local brewer, Mr Tappitt. At the ball given by their ambitious mother, it is Rachel, and not her own girls, who excites the admiration of all -- not least of Tappitt's extrovert young partner. Rachel's awakening feelings, through the physical stimulation of her first ball, are beautifully observed. Meanwhile her elder sister escapes with some difficulty the attentions and influence of the slimy young Curate, Mr Prong, whose heart is set more on the care of her modest fortune than the care of her immortal soul. This simple story neatly exposes the sociological strata of the average sleepy provincial English town in Victorian times with all its finely graded class distinctions. Publication Price: £29.00/$58.00 |
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