I mentioned on my Ana the Imp blog that I decided that this year was to be my Trollope period; that I was determined to chase this eminent Victorian down the highways of his fictions. Church or politics was to be the point of departure; the Chronicles of Barsetshire or the Palliser series. In the end politics and Palliser won out! I’ve now vaulted my first fence, just having finished – literally some twenty minutes ago – Can You Forgive Her?, the first of the six Palliser tomes. That word, the word ‘tome’, carries such negative overtones - at least I feel it does - , suggesting something weighty and just a tad tedious. Can You Forgive Her? is certainly weighty, weighing in at over eight hundred pages, though I did not find it in the least tiresome. The person one is supposed to forgive, the focus of the book, is Alice Vavasor, who finds it difficult to decide exactly whom she will marry: the worthy but dull John Grey (Trollope’s intention here is given away in his choice of name) or her cousin George, colourful and ambitious but ever so slightly disreputable. There is actually a supplementary question, closely related to the main one: namely, what is a woman to do with her life? Remember this is mid-Victorian England; there are few opportunities for people like Alice, who is far too well-connected to consider any ordinary occupation, while having the main routes for ambition closed to her by her sex. She is expected to marry well; her relatives (some of them have the most absurdly comic aristocratic titles I have ever come across!) expect her to marry well, which is to marry Grey, but for Alice love and duty are not enough; she needs a positive outlet; she needs to live vicariously through the success of her partner. In other words, she wants to be a politician’s wife! The whole novel is structured around choices and the implication that these choices carry. It’s also one of relationship triangles; the central one between Alice, John Grey and George Vavasor; the comic relief brought by Alice’s coquettish Aunt Greenow, a merry widow and her two suitors, Captain Bellfield and Mister Cheeseacre; and that between Plantagenet Palliser, a rising politician, his young wife, Lady Glencora, and her erstwhile suitor, Burgo Fitzgerald. Glencora, what can I say about Glencora? Devilish, impish, effervescent and vivacious, she was my favourite character by far. I never really warmed that much to Alice, who seems to be perversely committed to the wrong course. Oh, not just because she jilts the wholesome John Grey in favour, as it turns out, of the completely unwholesome George Vavasor, but because I found it difficult to determine exactly what her motives were. There is also something stiff about her character, something rather humourless. Glencora eclipses her completely. She has been presented with choices also; or rather she has had choices made for her, a rich heiress married for duty rather than love. One feels that Plantagenet and Alice would have been far better suited (Glencora’s humorous remarks and the statistical-mindedness of the pair are priceless), allowing Glencora to be swept away by the beautiful but feckless Burgo. But this is a morality tale, one of high Victorian morals, which the author clearly intends to promote, where money, property and a proper sense of place should never be allowed to drift too far apart. The likeable rakes and the despicable cads, the Burgos and the Georges, lose the game or disappear from it altogether. Well, there is the single exception of Captain Bellfield, rake rather than cad, who wins out over the worthy Cheeseacre, but one simply knows that the Widow Greenow is going to keep him reined well in! In the end, like all good morality tales, everything falls into place. Plantagenet decides that for a time his political ambitions must take second place to cultivating and nurturing his wife, with the result hoped for by all concerned. Alice realises that her decision to reject Grey in favour of George was so ill-judged that she finds it most difficult to forgive herself. Yes, she accepts Grey and they marry - though it seems in the end to be as a kind of penance – but only after she is most horribly patronised by him and by members of her extended family! At least she has one small success: Grey, with the help of Palliser, decides to enter Parliament, so Alice may have a political salon after all, rather than sink into a tedious routine of more mundane wifely duties. In the end I found myself sidestepping Trollope’s central question. Although I might have come closer to understanding her, I had absolutely no interest in forgiving her, or in condemning her, for that matter. All I will say in way of reproach is that she should have known her mind and her men better. I would. Trollope has a crisp and engaging style, much more disciplined than Dickens, his contemporary, must less panoramic and comically exuberant, better, in many ways, in creating more humanly rounded characters. He combines this with a tendency to intrude overmuch as the moralising narrator for my taste, with little homilies to the reader. That’s a small quibble because I found Can You Forgive Her? an immensely enjoyable novel of Victorian people and attitudes, though my reading is not necessarily the one the author would have wished. I’m a modern miss, you see, with few preconceived moral expectations, expectations about the proper place of women in the world. :-)So, on I go: Phineas Finn here I come.
All Trollope aficionados are periodically asked The Big Question: Which of Trollope's books should a newcomer read first? Even with 47 novels to choose from it's difficult to answer that question. I think you have to have read all of Trollope and be re-reading him before you truly appreciate his books. But of course you have to start somewhere.Can You Forgive Her? should be the place to start. It has everything that makes Trollope so beloved. There's a love story in which a young woman has to choose between marrying the man she loves or the man her family wants her to marry. In fact, there are two of them, with very different women making very different decisions. There's a hunting scene, one which is exciting to read and which throws light on one of the love plots and on two of the characters involved therein. There is an election story, where the candidate we are following must put a lot of money into the hands of questionable lawyers and innkeepers in order to bribe the voters.There is not one but two trips to Switzerland. Trollope liked to send his characters abroad to places he had recently visited and use the scenes and atmosphere of those places to enhance his stories. There's a wonderful inheritance plot, always interesting and important in Trollope novels. There's political negotiating for important jobs in a new government, if there is to be a new government. And there are house parties where the characters get to like one another - or in some cases to loathe one another.Most important in Can You Forgive Her? the reader is introduced to one of literature's most scintillating characters, Lady Glencora Palliser, the richest woman in Britain aside from the Queen, who is in love with one man but must marry another because she is too young to fight the countesses and marquesses who are her guardians. What she makes of that marriage and how is, in my opinion, one of the finest stories in Victorian literature.What about the title? Whom are we being asked to forgive and for what? Ostensibly we are judging Alice Vavasor, who breaks her engagement (a serious sin in itself) with the man she loves and becomes engaged to her cousin because she can't face the boring life she would lead with her beloved in Cambridgeshire, a place Trollope apparently felt was the most cheerless in England. By accepting her cousin's proposal she feels she can be part of his political campaign and have some interest in life aside from housekeeping and babies. And those dreary fens.But we are also asked to judge Lady Glencora who marries a man she doesn't love, a cardinal sin in Trollope. She then obsesses on the possibility of running away with the man she really loves. This is almost beyond possibility in Trollope as in most Victorian novels. Whether she elopes with this other man or not, can the reader ever really forgive her for even thinking of it?All of these delights make Can You Forgive Her? the ideal Trollope novel for a beginner except for one thing. It is about 1,000 pages long. Perhaps 50 years ago you could hand this to a reader inexperienced in the 19th century novel. But today could you seriously expect someone with no feel for the measured language and slow pace of the book to enjoy it - or even to finish it? Do you think they would forgive you for recommending it?This is, according to my records, the seventh time I've read the novel. I've also re-read parts of it many times. It's my favorite Trollope novel.6 Sept 2012 This is my eighth reading of the novel.
Do You like book Can You Forgive Her? (1975)?
I became immersed in Trollope's writing as I read this book. Alice Vavasor struggles to decide whether to marry her cousin, the ambitious George Vavasor or the gentlemanly John Grey. I urged her to make the right decisions as Trollope made the reader more aware than Alice. Other strands in the novel include Kate Vavasor, who is George's sister, Lady Glencora Palliser, recently married to Plantagenet Palliser who is a rising politician and Aunt Greenow, a wealthy widow. Trollope manages to weave these stories of very different, but connected, women wonderfully. His characterisation was so detailed and he showed them all compassionately with both their strengths and weaknesses. I loved the comedic rivalry between Mr Cheeseacre, the wealthy, but money-conscious farmer and Captain Bellfield, the handsome, poor soldier as they both compete to win Aunt Greenow's heart. It was a big book but it was a page-turner and I loved escaping into the world he created.
—Sarah
George Costanza excepted, I know less about women than anyone in the world, but I’d imagine that even liberated, post-feminist women could relate to the three feisty chicks at the centre of Can You Forgive Her? Pushed willy-nilly onto the marriage market, these wealthy Victorian ladies are faced with that eternal dilemma: how come all the hot, interesting guys are total dicks, and all the nice, bankable ones are kind of…blah? I’m vulgarizing shamelessly, but in fact each of these characters has to choose between a sexy bad-boy type and a dependable doofus. More to the point, maybe: each has to work out for herself a solution to another familiar dilemma, summed up by the novel’s heroine: ‘What should a woman do with her life?’ Trollope, needless to say, was no feminist. He tried hard to disguise himself as a typical Victorian gentleman, and his official views on the ‘woman question’ are an unappealing mishmash of genial male chauvinism and courtly condescension. But here’s the thing: Trollope was so far from being a misogynist that, on some fundamental level, he completely got women, sympathizing with them in ways he never did with men. That may be why, in Can You Forgive Her? , it’s the female characters who are fully developed moral agents, and the men who are stock figures out of Victorian central casting. (In this respect, Trollope is the inverse of Dickens, whose women are all Protestant Madonnas full of mercy and tears; personally, the only one I could believe for a second was Esther Summerson, and that’s because she was human enough to get smallpox). But apart from this rough-and-ready philogyny, what knocks me out about Trollope is his wisdom, which breathes through his books with something of the same quasi-divine calm that you sense in Tolstoy (who was a big fan of Trollope’s, by the way). Whatever they were like as individuals – and I know Tolstoy, at least, could be a prize idiot at times – as novelists, their default mode is wry omniscience. Both have the rare and generous capacity to honour a character’s singularity, to stay true to it even when their own moral or philosophical principles are all engaged on the opposite side. Lady Glencora, one of Trollope’s most fascinating creations, is a good example of this. In Can You Forgive Her?, he shows her seriously contemplating adultery, a crime for which the Victorians had a special horror. We see her lusting after a beautiful cad who - she is well aware - would probably end up gambling away her fortune and tossing her aside. She openly admits that she’d rather be beaten by such a man than endure a respectable life with her perfectly decent husband. All this is, of course, very, very bad. Trollope feels it to be bad. He disapproves. And yet he loves Glencora more than a little; he understands her right down to her smallest whim – and he wants us to love and understand her, too.God, there’s just so much life here, clumps of the stuff. Who would have thought that an 800-page triple decker about the endlessly prolonged romantic vacillations of a frigid, upper-class maiden would be not only great fun, but moving and profound? I’m not overlooking its flaws, either, the most obvious being that it’s morbidly, spectacularly obese. I repeat: Eight. Hundred. Freaking. Pages. If this book were a person, it would be a blubbery shut-in lolling in its own feces, waiting for the work crew to knock down the wall and bring in the special Sea World harness.More damaging than the sheer bulk, however, is the generic inconsistency: you have the almost Jamesian melodrama of the twinned central plot, which is then parodically duplicated in scenes of provincial clownishness involving an amorous widow. To my mind, this last subplot owes something to the older, 18th century comic novelists, while a few of the disreputable urban characters seem to have strolled over from a Dickens novel for a cameo (they even come with Dickensian names like Grimes, Tombe and Pinkle). Yet by some mysterious insufflation, Trollope manages to keep this immense, wayward monster alive and (fitfully) kicking. For all my enthusiasm, I don’t know anyone I would recommend the book to unreservedly. I can see how even the most willing reader might be turned off by the novel’s flab and by the slight gaminess of the prose (which might grow on you, though, as it did on me). Then too, I think you need a certain amount of ‘life experience’ to really appreciate Trollope’s shrewdness. I first read him at twenty or so and decided he was nothing special. Now, like Twain with his old man, I’m amazed at how smart he’s gotten all of a sudden.
—Buck
Anthony Trollpe's Can You Forgive Her is a massive and sprawling novel, and yet it folds very cleanly and neatly in a repeating pattern.Each of the three main female characters present the dilemma of how a woman charts a course and navigates through the minefields of Victorian propriety and social expectation to find love, or, at least, contentment.First, there is the widow Bellfield who is pursued by a pompous landowner and a penniless former soldier. Next there is Lady Glencora who is married to Plantagent Palliser, a cold, politically active, rich, but personally passive husband. Lady Glencora, however, still has deep feelings for a romantic, but impoverished former suitor. The central character, Alice Vavasor, is single, and is courted by the elegant and courtly John Grey. and her self-centred cad of a cousin George Vavasor.Throughout this massive novel Trollope weaves the various parameters and possibilities that exist within this matrix of possibilities. This novel will have you, at various times, both cheering for and being repelled by the major characters. At all times, however, Trollope steers a clear course, and the reader will be engaged with all the various events that occur within the novel.This novel is well worth the time you take to read it.
—Peter
