Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?

I usually have a 19th century novel in progress, and I came to Can You Forgive Her? straight from Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The Dickens/Trollope juxtaposition is instructive. As great as Dickens is, you certainly get more of a feel for "normal" human life and relations from Trollope. This includes romantic and sexual matters as well as the political and economic practicalities that Trollope is famous for illuminating. Can You Forgive Her? hinges on women's choices in the marriage arena, which is (if you think about it) rather outside Dickens's range even when plotting forces him to touch on it. There is also a touch of the grotesque about most of Dickens's memorable characters; Trollope is good precisely with the non-grotesque.

Two of my favorite (and quite well-known) passages about Trollope are from American novelists. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that Trollope's novels

...precisely suit my taste; solid, substantial, written on strength of beef and through inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of.

Henry James noted that Trollope's

...great, his incontestable merit, was a complete appreciation of the usual...he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings.

The title Can You Forgive Her? has always invited punning. Henry James answered Trollope's question, "Of course we can, and forget her, too, for that matter"; the satirical magazine Punch re-dubbed the novel Can You Stand Her?; Stephen King later came up with Can You Possibly Finish It? (it is a long book, but no longer than most Victorian three-deckers). Can You Stand Her? is perhaps the most apropos joke, since there is no doubt that the ditherings of the heroine Alice Vavasor between her two suitors can dispose the reader to exasperation with her. The analysis of her uncertainties is beautifully nuanced, somewhat Jamesian in fact; but there is also something a shade comic in her plight:

...could she permit it to be said of her that she had thrice in her career jilted a promised suitor, -- that three times she would go back from her word because her fancy had changed?

To which the answer would be, "Yes." But Alice's indecision also makes her a fascinatingly modern figure; and although Trollope's own sexual politics, which come across forcefully in the omniscient authorial commentary, are scarcely what we would call modern, he has put his finger on a sort of dilemma (played out in Lady Glencora Palliser's situation in this same book as well) that would continue to be central in novels that followed him. Can You Forgive Her? strikes me so far as a great book -- I have completed 37 of 80 chapters.