Five Other Novels

Abstract

Orley Farm is a kind of Great Expectations in reverse. The heroine of Trollope’s novel spends nearly the whole of her adult life, up to the beginning of the action with which the tale begins, not only in comfort but in an atmosphere of assured respectability, of place, even of contentedness. Having married Sir Joseph Mason, a man forty-five years her senior, she begins her adult life with prospects at least as bright as those of Pip when reunited with Estella at the end of the Dickens novel. Orley Farm, by contrast, records a decline from weal to woe just as persuasively as Great Expectations depicts an advance, steady though not uninterrupted, from woe to weal. But there is a bitter difference, one is almost tempted to say a sentimental difference: Pip sheds his priggishness and thus deserves the happy ending which, in the second version at least, he achieves; but Lady Mason is her own Abel Magwitch: as the criminal of the piece, she is the victim of her own misdeed, and it is the revelation of her criminality, unsparingly but not unsympathetically set forth, which is the stuff of Orley Farm. Moreover, Trollope strikes a note here that is encountered frequently in his fictions, that of the outsider in a homogeneous world to which admittance is difficult, and expulsion easy — the very stuff of the early pages of the Autobiography.