Trollope's gifts

Anthony Trollope has two special gifts that make him worthy of remembering in the Victorian canon.

The first, which I think his most remarkable, is his ability to create believable women characters. Dickens can’t do it, Thackeray can’t do it, no male author that I can think of has accomplished it, but Trollope. It first became obvious when I was reading Doctor Thorne and realized that I liked the women better than the men, and mostly because I could completely understand them. Trollope understood the female psyche, perhaps better than some psychoanalysts, and not only did he understand them, he respected them. Most of the women in Trollope have better character than the men, even though they are never perfect. In Doctor Thorne, it is Frank, the hero, who goes astray and is chastised by Miss Dunstable, who understands men like Trollope understood women, while Mary remains constant and firm throughout. We end up liking Mary and Miss Dunstable more than Frank, feeling not that Mary was lucky to win the heart of such a noble man, but that Frank was incredibly lucky to have such excellent women around him. Many of Trollope’s books have women as the main characters, and he gives them as much time and thought as he does his men. Throughout Barchester Towers, while it is the men who seem to be in control, Trollope drolly shows how Mrs. Proudie and Mrs. Grantly have just as much control in their spheres, as the men do in theirs. Whenever Trollope delves into the thoughts of his women, I smile to see how accurately he captures the way women think, and wonder how he could do it. In many ways, he is like Mrs. Gaskell, who gives her male characters time and thought and understanding, unlike Austen and Brontë, where the male characters are mainly there to propose to the heroine. And unlike Dickens, where the women are there mainly to be loved by men, Trollope uses a master’s touch, and gives both women and men a reason to read his books.

His second special talent is his ability to make the reader feel sorry for anyone. There are no villains in Trollope, no characters who seemed to have been born with evil thoughts and desires. There are many characters who do dastardly things, but Trollope realizes that there are few people who do things, even bad things, without reason. Outwardly, Mr. Slope of Barchester Towers seems heartless and blindly ambitious, but Trollope opens his mind up to the readers, and we see the principles that he thinks he follows, and the torment he feels when he feels hopelessly attracted to a married woman. In The Way We Live Now, Sir Felix Carbury seems hopelessly lost for most of the book, until we are ready to believe him a cookie-cutter villain, when he is saved from cliché by performing the one good deed of his life: trying to protect his sister’s honor. And what is more, it doesn’t seem out of character. This is an amazing gift of Trollope’s, being able to find sympathy for every person in the world. He doesn’t expect us to like them all, certainly not, but he expects us to understand and pity them in their wrongdoing. Once again, he shares some of this gift with Mrs. Gaskell.

These two, one with a gentle droll style, and the other with a sharp eye and a firm hand, unobtrusively carve a place for themselves in the hearts of the readers who are so lucky as to discover them.