Being “Off Course” in The Small House at Allington: Expectations, Realities and What Trollope Wants the Reader to Know About Love, the Novel and Modern Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores the many “off course” occurrences in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864). Whether these courses relate to geography, romance, morality, heroism, genre or the trajectories of modernity, Trollope’s novel persistently deviates from norms and expectations; not only with regard to reality but also in terms of how these conventions work as novelistic constructions. The essay reads Lily's failed romance with Crosbie, Bell’s rejection of societal expectations concerning her path, as well as Crosbie’s and Eames’s diverging motivations and avenues towards success to show that Trollope’s favoured expression “as a matter of course” here becomes a matter of being, or turning, “off course”. I relate these thematic deviations to Trollope’s poetic reflections on the novel. The essay suggests that Trollope, in fact, sees the novel’s harmony, honesty and “oneness” in a departure from expected ethics, character and plot patterns: only in these deviations can novelistic newness emerge and complex (modern) matters be discussed. Trollope thus fosters, in this novel, an awareness of how novelistic “truth” lies not in what readers—as people and consumers of fiction—expect but, rather, in what the collision between fantasy and reality reveals to them, in actual and representational terms.