The Eustace Diamonds: The Truth of Trollope's Fiction

Abstract

In no other Victorian novel does the heroine get as much abuse from the narrator of story as Lizzie Eustace gets in The Eustace Diamonds. Lizzie's story begins grudgingly: will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved (1).1 Lack of love grows in the succeeding pages until it looks like hatred. The reader is told that Lizzie is selfish, hard-fisted little woman (5); she is worldly, hard, and given entirely to evil things (69); she is abominable (35). The narrator's abuse, however, is mild in comparison to what the other characters say Lizzie. Mr. Camperdown regards as a dishonest, lying, evil-minded harpy (11); Mrs. Hittaway calls a nasty, low, scheming, ill-conducted, dishonest little wretch (67); and Lady Linlithgow tops the rest by declaring about as bad as anybody ever was. She's false, dishonest, heartless, cruel, irreligious, ungrateful, mean, ignorant, greedy, and vile! ... She's all that, and great deal worse (34). No one in The Eustace Diamonds has anything good to say Lizzie. Everyone, narrator and characters alike, treats as distasteful intrusion into world which would be much more comfortable without her. When story is done, everyone is relieved. never was so sick of anything in my life as I am of Lady Eustace, announces Lord Chiltern in the last chapter of the novel (80). And the narrator dismisses in agreement with the Duke of Omnium's prediction that Lizzie hasn't got what I call good time before her (80)-a prediction amply fulfilled in Phineas Redux. From grudged beginning Lizzie moves to spiteful ending, constantly abused along the way by narrator who does not love and by a' crowd of fellow characters who love her, if possible, even less than he does. Lizzie is the first of Trollope's reprehensible upstarts. Like Melmotte in The Way We Live Now and Lopez in The Prime Minister, there is too much of the mushroom Lizzie (21). Elevated by guile and accident, she rises into world where she does not belong by right, and the wreckage she makes there is Trollope's announcement that the traditional British enclosure of gentlemen and