Greetings from the Editors

Abstract

Victorians Journal 5 Gratings from thg editors As Adam Gopnik has recently told us in The New Yorker (May 4), “Trollope is Trending.” For that high-profile attention in an iconic cultural and literary magazine, we who have been reading Trollope and writing about his work for decades are grateful—but not surprised. The argument for Trollope’s art as sophisticated and modern as well as deeply engaging is one Trollope scholars have been making for quite some time now. Trollopians such as Robert Polhemus {The Changing World of Anthony Trollope), Juliet McMaster {Trollope’s Palliser Novels), and Robert Tracy {Trollope’s Later Novels) have long pointed out his characters’ psychological complexity, the “depth ofportraiture” that David Skilton—one of Trollope’s great editors—focuses on in a recent essay. The intricacies of Trollope’s deceptively “transparent” prose have been remarked upon at least since Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor claimed that Trollope’s narrator likes “to lead his reader very gently up the garden path of his own conventions and prejudices and then to point out that the reader is wrong. This is not very like the behavior of a typical mid-Victorian gentleman” (168). It is now generally accepted among Trollope scholars that his fiction engages the intricacies not only of the individual psyche—in layered, complicated prose—but that Trollope also immerses himself in the most complex issues of the Victorian society in which he wrote his books. His work addresses the discourses of gender and nationhood in particular, but also responds to social class tensions and racial history, issues that still intensely occupy us today (see Morse, Reforming Trollope). These essays on Trollope build on past scholarship to read his novels in fascinating new ways. In the long wake of germinal scholarship by James Kincaid {The Novels ofAnthony Trollope) and Christopher Herbert {Trollope and Comic Pleasure), a group of essays focus on the marriage plot, discovering in Trollope’s fiction adaptations and critiques of that narrative convention. In “Why You Can’t Forgive Her: Vocational Women and the Suppressive Hypothesis,” Talia Schaffer examines the economic background of the Langham Place movement, which from the mid-1850s onwards sought to expand the 6 Victorians Journal opportunities for work for women, when activists like Emily Faithful, Bessie Raynor Parkes, and Barbara Leigh Smith pragmatically realized that creating access to work would lead to more equality more quickly than fighting for legislative reform. The first half of the essay, which focuses on their work and their achievements, is scrupulously delineatedbefore Schafferproceeds to examine Can You Forgive Her?, the first novel of the Palliser series, in this light. Schaffer proposes that this marriage novel is a critique of the convention oferotic marriage, and one that advances the concept ofthe vocational marriage, where a woman’s choice of spouse is predicated on a life with a career for her too, alongside her husband. This reading leads to some telling ironies, many of them uncomfortable. In a subtle re-working of Sharon Marcus’s thesis in Between Women, she sees the happiest “marriage” as being between Plantagenet Palliser and John Grey, as Palliser convinces Grey of the fulfilment of a life in politics. John Grey and Alice each achieve the other’s ideal ending, as Grey gets the exciting career and Alice ends up with the peaceful estate in Cambridge. Lauren Cameron also creates a new perspective on Can You Forgive Her? when she examines Darwin’s influence on Trollope’s novel. Cameron too links her analysis to the story of Alice Vavasor, rather than focusing on sparkling Glencora McCluskie—Palliser’s courtship, unhappy early marriage, and flirtation with her rakish former suitor Burgo Fitzgerald—as many Trollope scholars have done: Alice’s plotline is the heart of the book, which begins with her past and closes with her future. Trollope views Alice as a worthwhile subject of study and one of the reasons—I argue in this article—is that her experience provides a test case for Darwinian narratives that were gripping public attention and intellectual imaginations in the years following the publication of On the Origin of Species. . . . Alice’s plot shows us that Darwinian evolutionary principles function...