Anthony Trollope

The Warden Anthony Trollope

This is the first of Anthony Trollope's "Chronicles of Barsetshire" novels, and his first popularly successful novel. The basic plot is that the Warden, Mr. Harding, has 1) a sinecure church position that pays him 800 pounds a year; 2) a reform-minded friend who's trying to abolish church sinecures; 3) a daughter who wants to marry the reform-minded friend; and 4) an existing son-in-law of an Archdeacon who takes defending the Rights of the Church very, very seriously. If you like Jane Austen novels there's a good chance you'll like this, as the basic plots -- church livings, the marriage prospects of 19th-centry british gentry -- are fairly similar. Trollope's prose here is fairly light and clear, and if not quite as sharply witty as Austen's, no one else's prose is either. Trollope does spill a great deal of ink on lengthy asides to the reader, some of which paint interesting pictures of contemporary British culture and some of which modern readers may find *amazingly* skippable. Overall, this one's a lightly pleasant example of precisely the sort of intelligent, Victorian parlor romance it's trying to be. If you like this, the next volume in sequence is Barchester Towers; it's a bit more comically satirical, somewhere in between this and P. G. Wodehouse, but almost certainly something you'll enjoy if you liked this one.