Reading my 28th Trollope

The Belton Estate and other thoughts

Anthony Trollope wrote nearly 50 novels and honestly I thought I’d read more of them than I have. This summer I read his 1865 novel The Belton Estate, number 28 on my list (of course I keep a list). It’s under the Comic Novels heading on the list of complete works I saved from the Trollope Society website years ago, and while it’s not as much of a tearjerker as some, I wouldn’t go in there expecting that many laughs. It is the only Trollope novel I can think of offhand that doesn’t contain any fox-hunting scenes, though.

As with Jane Austen, who he admired, Anthony Trollope often wrote novels which were essentially about a young woman of upper-middle to upper class background, and the winning of a suitable husband. As an interesting side point, Trollope notes here that going down on one’s knees to propose marriage is seen as old-fashioned, and the modern thing is to simply suggest in an offhand way that ‘we may as well get together’ — funny how things come back around.

In The Belton Estate, Clara Amedroz has two suitors and the novel at its core is about which of the two she will marry, if either. Of course it’s also about other things, like who gets to decide who is a ‘suitable’ friend for an unmarried woman who has no father or older brother to obey (remember this is from 1865), and what happens to women who grow up in big houses like Belton Castle which are then inherited by distant relations when their father dies, because of the way inheritance works — something of this nature was a storyline in the first series of Downton Abbey, as I recall.

If you haven’t read any Anthony Trollope I should maybe put in a good word for him at this point in case he sounds dull, old-fashioned or melodramatic. He is often wryly amusing and his satires of the church in the Barchester novels and politics in the Palliser novels are delicious. He is a sharp observer of hypocrisy and sadly so many of his observations still hold true; The Way We Live Now keeps being rediscovered as yet another financial scandal renders it relevant once more. For many years Trollope wrote around the demands of his day-job with the Post Office, by the way — it was he who introduced the pillar box.

Clara is the most infuriatingly stubborn character; I found myself exasperated with her early on and willing her to change before I was halfway through. She is said to have passed her twenty-fifth birthday, and she has been running her father’s household during his decline. In other words she isn’t a giddy young girl and she’s used to making decisions and taking charge. Unfortunately she’s one of those people that can’t bear to change their mind once it’s made up, even as it slowly dawns on her that she might have got it wrong.

Given that the novel is from 1865 and is largely about marriage prospects, there were surprisingly modern sentiments in there. The stubbornness and independence of thought shown by Clara, for one thing, and the way she’s described as rebellious by habit — she almost has to go against a particular character simply because that person is setting themselves in authority over her, which is not what you expect from an upper class Victorian. The forgiveness for a woman who has once been disgraced, for another.

Today we don’t bat an eyelid when a couple aren’t married (my other half and I have been not married to each other for 25 years), although even when I was a child it was frowned upon and routinely referred to as ‘living in sin’. When Trollope was writing this novel 160 years ago it was simply not done, and any woman who was seen as ‘a mistress’ i.e. was sleeping with a man she wasn’t married to, would forfeit polite society. At the same time, many men in polite society had mistresses.

There is a minor character in The Belton Estate who we discover had lived with her present husband for some years before marriage, as she’d run away from an abusive first husband who has only recently died. This is enough not only to remove her from all her former friends, but to cause other minor characters to refuse to accept her acquaintances as guests, because she has tainted them by association. Clara, and Trollope-as-narrator, ask for our sympathy for this woman, and suggest she is as good as the next woman. This, and particularly the different standards for men and women, seems to be something Trollope felt strongly about, and he explored it more fully in An Eye For An Eye, which he wrote in 1870.

As you can see from the photo, I read the Oxford World’s Classics edition (1986), which I bought from a charity shop. I made the mistake of starting to read the introduction, which of course gave major plot points away. I remain utterly baffled as to why anyone would put the analysis at the start, thus ruining the surprise for anyone reading the novel for the first time. Why not have it at the end, like you sometimes see suggested book club discussion points on recent novels?

The explanatory notes confused me as well. What I would have liked to know was: what was the ‘front’ that Lady Aylmer wore? Some kind of hairpiece, from context. A great fuss is made about it, it’s not simply a thing that’s mentioned in passing, and yet it doesn’t have an explanatory note. Unlike the notes telling us that ‘hedgerows are rows of bushes and trees forming a hedgeline’, or the significance of the surname Plantagenet!

As Trollope novels go, The Belton Estate was not bad — I was gripped, anyway — but I wouldn’t suggest it as a starter book if you haven’t read any Trollope before. Ayala’s Angel is perhaps a better example of a similar sort. The Warden, the first Barchester novel, is a good place to start if you think you might be in for the long haul, but if you think you might only ever read a single Trollope, it’s got to be The Way We Live Now.