I tend to enjoy long series of novels with complex plots and varied
characters.
Dorothy
Dunnett and Sharon K. Penman’s historical series are
two examples. But 19th century British literature is also full of long,
complex books that can totally wrap themselves around my imagination and
allow me to live in the story while it lasts. This novel is roughly 900
pages long. It ties together the previous novels in the series so tightly
that if you haven’t read them you will miss much of the richness of the
story and the subtle references made to the past. It’s long and involved
and very Victorian.

With that said, I barely could put it down long enough to eat or get some
sleep. The essential storyline revolves around Rev. Josiah Crawley’s
indictment on theft charges for allegedly stealing a check and using it
to pay off bills. Crawley is a perpetual curate in a Hogglestock, a small
village on the periphery of Barsetshire. He and his wife and kids are
near starvation and crushed under the shame of poverty–shame that is
made much, much worse by the fact that he was raised a gentleman and is
highly educated. But he has a fatal flaw. His gentleman’s pride makes him
refuse any help and his personality is so prickly with it that he puts
off anyone wanting to help him. He even refuses a lawyer for the trial
since he doesnÂ’t have the cash to pay for one and won’t take the charity
of his friends. And he has become depressed to the point of being nearly
psychotic.

That’s the skeleton that Trollope fleshes out with the love story of
Grace Crawley and Henry Grantly, the adventures of Conroy Dalrymple and
Clara Van Siever, the broken romance of Lily Dale and Johnny Eames and
the marital relationships of Archdeacon Grantly and his wife and Bishop
Proudie and his wife. Mrs. Proudie is absolutely the best female
character I have read in a long time. She’s an interfering, prideful,
domineering, sneaky woman who so totally overwhelms her husband that she,
in fact, is the real Bishop of Barsetshire and he only a figurehead.
Everyone, including her husband, hates her with a passion. I did too. Her
fate in the end is wonderfully apt. Trollope puts some hysterically funny
episodes in this novel, including a scene where Johnny Eames, a minor
character, has to escape the clutches of an admiring woman on the make
for a husband by crawling out a window because her mother has locked him
in. But when Trollope made Mrs. Proudie, he pulled out all the stops.