The Trollope Challenge
My reading resolution for 2011 was to finish reading all of Trollope’s 47 novels, and I did it!
Here’s the list, along with links to those I reviewed. I wrote posts on my Top Ten Trollopes, and also Ten Terrible Trollopes.
- Can You Forgive Her?
- Phineas Finn
- The Eustace Diamonds
- Phineas Redux
- He Knew He Was Right
- The Way We Live Now
- Lady Anna
- Is He Popenjoy?
- Rachel Ray
- Linda Tressel
- Cousin Henry
- The Vicar of Bullhampton
- Kept in the Dark
- Miss Mackenzie
- The Belton Estate
- The Claverings
- The American Senator
- John Caldigate
- The Prime Minister
- The Duke’s Children
- Ayala’s Angel
- The Fixed Period
- Dr Wortle’s School
- An Old Man’s Love
- The Warden
- Barchester Towers
- Dr Thorne
- An Eye for an Eye
- Framley Parsonage
- The Small House at Allington
- The Last Chronicle of Barset
- Marion Fay
- Mr Scarborough’s Family
- Nina Balatka
- Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite
- Harry Heathcote of Gangoil
- The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson
- The Golden Lion of Granpere
- The Macdermots of Ballycloran
- Ralph the Heir
- The Three Clerks
- Orley Farm
- The Bertrams
- La Vendée
- The Kelly’s and the O’Kellys (nearly there!)
- Castle Richmond (one to go!)
- The Landleaguers (done it!)
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
youre ahead of me. at the beginning of this year i worked through charlotte yong chronologically and now im working my way thru trollope chronologically. mostly its rereading since ive already read almost everything that was on project gutenberg a few years ago. however this time im trying to be fairly strictly chronological except that i skipped the first three books by mistake and i just couldnt stomach the struggles of brown smith and robinson. linda tressel was pretty awful too but i managed to get thru it. im on phineas finn at this point. the other exception is that i skipped orley farm which ive already read several times. after i finish phineas ill go back and do the first three. ive downloaded almost everything to my kindle and am thinking that will definitely last me thru my one month vacation in england next month. i love ebooks! thanks for the link to braddon – i read lady audleys secret back in the 80s but havent tried any of the others, now i will.
Many thanks for your comment, Rachel. It’s good to hear that someone else is embarking on their own challenge! I rather liked ‘The Struggles of Brown, Smith and Robinson’ and ‘Linda Tressel’ – it’s interesting that Trollope provokes such different reactions in his readers.
I’ve never managed to finish a Charlotte Yonge, so I’d love some advice on where to start.
Read Trollope very lightly in the past. Last year, on advice from a doctor to relax, I picked up Framley Parsonage. I don’t know exactly what has captured me yet, but ‘it’ has me good and tight.
My husband gifted me a Nook, and the first download was all of Trollope’s novels, short stories and non-fiction for .. get this .. $1.09 with tax. Now, my Miss Posey Nook is with me always.
Like you, I intent to read all the Trollope I can find. But I would rather not do it in a year or 2 or whatever. I’d like to savor it over time. In the thrall of Vicar of Bulhampton currently. Mr. Fenwick is, so far, my Trollope hero.
Good luck on your project. I’ll be reading your blog.
Diahann
Seattle, WA
Hello Diahann. Many thanks for your comment. Nooks aren’t available over here, so I’d been wondering what they were like. Given you’ve named yours, she must be a very important member of the family! I’m rattling through the Trollopes mainly so that I can avoid sweeping generalisations in my thesis. I shall be going back and savouring my favourites. I loved The Vicar of Bullhampton and it sounds as though you’re enjoying it, too. Do let me know what you think to the others. I’m rather behind with my Trollope posts at the moment, but hope to catch up soon.
I started on the 29th October 2011 so am just over a month into it. I got a complete iPad/Kindle download for £3.71 for everything (including the short stories) and have just finished my thirteenth novel (The Fixed Period) reading in the (fairly random) order in which they appear. Two of the short stories were interspersed: ‘The Chateau of Prince Polignac’ and ‘The Courtship of Susan Bell’. I won’t attempt any other fiction until I have worked my way through the lot: they become easier to pick up when your head is attuned to Trollope’s style and the social environment of which he is writing.
Goodness, 13 Trollopes in a month! Are you aiming to be done by the end of 2011?
Much as I envy the readers who can get through dozens of books in a year, I seem unable to join their ranks. So I’ve learned to be content with a Trollope every Christmas season — just finished Framley Parsonage. At this rate I know I won’t get through them all but I expect I’ll be able to get through the remaining Barsetshire novels, the Pallisers, and The Way We Live Now. And his Autobiography.
Wow, what an acheivement! Congratulations! I have only read 28 of the novels, having started with the Barset novels in 2007. ‘Mr Scarborough’s Family’ will be my next AT…. it is ready and waiting on my ereader
Thank you, Laura! I must confess that not all of them are worth reading. I’ll be posting a list of Top Trollopes this month. Hope you enjoy Mr Scarborough.
I took a break over Christmas for some non-fiction including Clive James’ “A Point of View”, and the late Christopher Hitchens’ “God is Not Great”. Ironically, the GING immediately preceded my resumption with Linda Tressel – which haunts me still. Horrible story, skillfully written: it should be compulsory reading for anyone wishing to understand (modern) arranged marriages enforced against the wishes of the woman. I’ve passed the half-way mark (24 novels and 10 short stories), but after reading Cicero I am skipping the non-fiction: it was secondary or tertiary material from scholarship 150 years out of date. I hated An Eye for an Eye (grim little tale) but John Bull at the Guadalquivir is the best short story I have ever read.
Most of what I read is non-fiction (a lot of history and biography and modern science) but one of the advantages of reading fiction is that you are there in the scene and not just looking down as an observer. As I wrote earlier, Linda Tressel gave me a greater insight into the horrors of arranged marriages than anything else I have read in a long life, and I have had a similar Eureka moment from Mr Scarborough’s Family – just finished. Dolly Grey tells her father “I have the maid servants (plural) to look after, and to guard against their lovers . . . and to see that the cook does not give the fragments to the policeman.” Vast amounts of time must have been spent by the characters in Trollope’s books in communicating with the servants and other lower orders, but this communication is almost completely written out of the stories as irrelevant because it does not involve fellow human beings. Trollope’s England must have been very like Apartheid South Africa or the African colonies: I remember a young Rhodesian woman telling me (just post-UDI) that the population of Rhodesia was quarter of a million . . .
Many thanks for your comment, Martin. You’ve reminded me that I must review Linda Tressel. Like you, I was horrified by the portrayal of arranged (or forced) marriages, and it was a very uncomfortable read.
You make a very good point about apartheid – that describes very well the position of servants, who were treated as being almost a different species, with baser instincts and simpler needs. If they thought of them as “people” then it would be unacceptable to demand that they empty their chamberpots, etc. The first stage of any form of bigotry seems to be deciding that the object is somehow less human.
(I’ll understand if you cut or reject this as being too long.)
I finally finished the last Trollope, Ayala’s Angel, at 2:30 this morning. So these are some reflections on the forty-seven novels.
If I were to recommend a Trollope to someone who hadn’t read any before then I should recommend Rachel Ray. It is not too long, Rachel is a lovely character, it is a good exposition of one of Trollope’s favourite themes (the nastiness of fundamentalist Christianity), and the place he is writing about feels real. And it has a happy ending.
There are three books I should not recommend anyone to read, except out of morbid curiosity. I certainly will never reread them, and would only open them again for reference. They are:
La Vendee
An Eye for An Eye
The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson
La Vendee has some patches in that come alive, especially around the chateau, but otherwise it feels like painting by numbers with real people and real events having to be ticked off on a list. He did not know the countryside of which he was writing (which is usually one of his strengths) and it shows. If it had been my first Trollope then I would never have read any others.
An Eye for An Eye is simply a horrible story. Well written but horrible.
The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson is a satire, and Trollope can’t do satire. It is written in a tone that is entirely false and the whole effect is patronising. It is as if Prince Charles were to write a ‘humorous’ novel about how silly poor people are.
These three aside, I think the whole oeuvre is remarkably consistent as to stories, characters, and quality of writing. I suspect that any of the remaining forty-four could be in someone’s top three, according to taste or what you look for in a book. I think that the six Barsetshires are the most consistent of the two six-book series. Of these six, I thought Dr Thorne and Framley Parsonage were my favourites: I liked the characters of Thorne, Grace and Lady Lufton. I concede that if the figure of Septimus Harding catches your imagination or love – and he didn’t mine – then the six books are raised up because your sympathy for him would flow into others less sympathetic such as Grantly. Grantly does grow as a character through the series but anyone who produces the obnoxious Griselda has a stain which it is difficult to overcome.
I think Phineas Finn and the last three Pallisers are however greater than the six Barsetshires, primarily because of the characters of Phineas Finn and Mme Max. The Eustace Diamonds was a good plot idea but I never engaged with the character of Lizzie. I shall in due course reread Can You Forgive Her? and maybe change my opinion that Alice was an irritating flirt (I was pleased that she married the right man, but more for his benefit than hers) but at the moment my answer to the title is ‘No’. I didn’t share the view of Lady Glencora as everyone’s favourite Trollope heroine but I did warm to her in The Prime Minister – just in time for her to be killed off!
The Irish novels seem largely to be written off as early pieces or late pieces by the Literati, but taken as a whole (even including Eye-4-Eye) I feel the five gave me an insight into The Irish Problem (and how hopeless it was) that I didn’t have previously. The Macdermots shares with Stephen King’s Tommyknockers the unique distinction in all books I have read in killing all the characters off – well, almost all, the father goes insane and has not long to live. Also, you know by page five that all this is going to happen, but even so the sheer power of the description and characters keeps you going on to the end. Feemy is an especially tragic heroine: uneducated, isolated. with a warm heart and attractive human qualities – but absolutely no way of raising herself out of the mire except by prostituting the brief attractiveness she possesses before her looks go downhill. Anty in The Kellys and The O’Kellys is a similar character, but at least she has a happy ending. Until I read Landleaguers I hadn’t realised how active the Americans were at that early date, but it makes sense in that they would have been as the generation brought up by those who had fled the Great Hunger. I thought Castle Richmond is probably the best of the five as a novel, but I actually liked The Kellys more.
On to my Desert Island, I would take Rachel Ray as my luxury and the following eight.
The Three Clerks
John Caldigate
Ralph The Heir
Orley Farm
Nina Balakta
Linda Tressel
Lady Anna
Ayala’s Angel
The Three Clerks is semi-autobiographical and in effect all the characters are teenagers or in their early 20s. There is a freshness and youthful feel to it.
John Caldigate again gives us a picture of the fanaticism of fundamentalist Christianity and is quite disturbing book, albeit with a happy ending.
Ralph The Heir I is absolutely hilarious in parts and I have found a couple of blogs on the net that think it is his best novel. I couldn’t seriously dispute this view although I find it difficult to single one out.
Orley Farm also figures on at least one ‘best’ list, and again I couldn’t violently disagree.
Nina and Linda I view as a pair: they were both anonymous. Nina has a happy ending and Linda doesn’t.
Lady Anna is for me one of the best structured novels, and also features another Trollope strength, obsession. (Also a ‘best’ candidate for some people.)
Ayala’s Angel is bright and fresh and full of light and the teasing conversations between Ayala and Jonathan are unlike anything else Trollope has written and are quite delightful.
Of the rest, I would single out:
The Claverings, for the character of Julia.
The Golden Lion of Granpere for the feeling of France.
Harry Heathcote of Gangol, again for a successful foreign feel.
The Vicar of Bulhampton would have been more of a favourite if Trollope had found a happy ending for Harry Gilmore, although obviously not in marrying Mary.
The Bertrams was the novel that really determined me to read them all. It feels realistic, and the ending is strangely ambiguous for Trollope. It haunted me for several days.
The Way We Live Now was too long and too complex to really grab me. I think it might better have been two novels, one about Melmotte and the other about The Carburys.
He Knew he Was Right is attractive to anyone who knows Exeter, even though the wider theme is very dark. I thought the Emily and Louis were both equally wrong originally and that the situations that created the schism were realistic. Emily however was the stronger and more reasonable character and this counterpointed Louis’ descent into madness.
Kept in the Dark is a counterpoint to He Knew he was Right, with a happy ending.
Sir Harry Hotspur again would have been more of a favourite if it hadn’t been so bleak.
Is He Popenjoy? I really liked for the character of the Dean, and also the married relationship between George and Mary and its happy resolution. Both were a little immature, and grew up.
Marion Fay is an odd one: not least because she doesn’t appear until well into the novel. I didn’t really see why Hampstead saw no parallel between his love of Marion and is sister’s love of George. I’ll remember it, but was slightly perplexed.
Cousin Henry is probably my least favourite of the forty-four, but one I shall attempt again. I didn’t really sympathise with her guardian’s obsession with the family name, and didn’t really like Isabel.
Mr Scarborough’s Family is an entertaining picture of a thoroughgoing rogue, and I think I may push it up the charts when I read it again.
The American Senator would have been a better novel with the American Senator left out! I didn’t see what he added to it, other than as a polemical device.
Dr Whortle’s School was an early favourite, but a little too slight to keep in the top ten.
The Belton Estate I also need to reread. It is unusually shades of grey for Trollope, and I don’t quite understand what The Askertons have to do with the story. I think I have missed something.
The Fixed Period is a must read. It is set in 1980 (nineteen-eighty, not eighteen-eighty). Quite unlike anything else.
An Old Man’s Love was sentimentally sad, and I think Trollope ought to have found William a happier ending than he did.
Miss Mackenzie didn’t really engage me apart from the revolting Rev Maguire, but Margaret did deserve the some-sort-of happy ending she eventually was granted, if only to get away from Maguire.
I found this blog while researching waxworks for the class I teach to adult learners – we’re studying The Old Curiosity Shop this half term.
It’s such a thrill to find other Trollope readers! I was lucky enough to find a complete Oxford Pocket Classic set on a trip to Hay on Wye in the summer and although I have read many of them before I too am determined to work my way through chronologically over the next few years, between teaching prep and my own writing.
Hello Allie. Thank you for your comment. A complete set of Trollopes was an excellent find! Good luck with your own reading challenge. I’ll make regular visits to your blog to find out how you’re getting on.
Well done–looks like you read most of them. I’ve only every read the Palliser novels and the Barchester novels, but the are among my favorite novels. Just listened to an audio version of Harry Heathcote. It’s almost hard to believe it’s Trollope (but then again, in the scheme of things, I’m not very familiar with his entire output). Most shocking was the complete lack of satire. I found your blog because I was interested in a review of Harry Heathcote and was happy to find your very well-written critique as well as the background info on what inspired Trollope to write the book. I’m planning to read more Trollope this winter so your posts about the books will help me decide which ones I might find most appealing. But first I want to reread the Barchester Chronicles. So great!
Many thanks for your comment, Rozanne. I read all the Trollopes, although haven’t yet reviewed all 47. Some of them I’d happily read again, but a few were absolutely stinkers! My favourites are here:
http://blog.catherinepope.co.uk/2012/01/top-ten-trollopes/
Enjoy the Barchester Chronicles, and do let me know how you get on.