Volume 36, Number 13 · August 17, 1989
Living with Trollope
By John Bayley
The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope
by R.H. Super
University of Michigan Press, 528 pp., $35.00
Trollope: Living With Character
by Stephen Wall
Holt, 397 pp., $35.00
He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope
by Jane Nardin
Southern Illinois University Press, 272 pp., $27.95
There is an amusing scene in Anthony Powell's roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, in which a brigadier demands of a very junior officer what he thinks of Trollope. It is wartime, 1940, and the novelist has suddenly become popular again. The junior officer is the narrator: in fact the author himself. After a difficult moment wondering whether truth or respectfulness would be more in order he replies that he has never found Trollope 'particularly easy to read.' An explosion follows, and he is required to produce the name of a novelist whom he does like. 'Well, Sir, there's Balzac.' Another explosion.
Review, 3546 words
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