Light and Momentary

Just a little more Trollope blogging

My husband used to trot out the name Trollope as a metonym for overrated Victorian fiction: dull, overlong, irrelevant, generally unpleasant. In consequence I had very low expectations of Barchester Towers: I did not have any idea that I would love that book. Yesterday I was telling Stella about the Kindle Unlimited report on my most popular and most obscure reading choices. "Let me guess," she said. "Trollope is the most obscure?" (Trollope is indeed the most obscure. Is He Popenjoy? is not getting a lot of love from Kindle Unlimited users.)

It is true that Trollope revisits a lot of the same ideas across his books, but who among us could write 47 entirely distinct novels in the early morning hours before we went off to our real jobs? I am going to make a list of what I've read so far to minimize the memory blur.

1. Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. Short, sad, just blogged about it yesterday.
2. The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. A haberdasher goes out of business, as told from the perspective of the partner in charge of publicity. Wince-inducing, with some zingy and still-relevant thoughts on advertising. I was glad it was short.
3. Is He Popenjoy? My favorite of the six I've read in 2024. The second son of a noble family has a title and land but no money. He marries a young woman with money but no title. Will she be faithful? Will he be faithful? The older brother is a memorably ignoble noble, a recurring Trollope trope.
4. Lady Anna. A wicked old nobleman leaves his widow and daughter in penury. The daughter wants to marry her first love; her mother has higher aims. Like Marion Fay, it illustrates the toll parental ambition can take on parental character.
5. Orley Farm. A second wife desperately wants her son to inherit a place to call his own. A deeply unlikable eldest son and a slimy solicitor are in the right under the law. If we hope they lose, are we in the wrong? One of my favorites. 
6. Cousin Henry. A squire with no son faces hard decisions when he writes his will. Like Sir Harry, he has a winsome daughter and a clever solicitor.
7. Marion Fay. A tale of two engagements that cross class boundaries; feels like an overly sentimental rehash of familiar characters and ideas. Reminiscent of The Duke's Children but we have less investment in the characters.
8. The Fixed Period. Very strange dystopian fiction; predicting the future is hard.
9. The Three Clerks. Early and autobiographical, funny and perspicacious. Infighting and moral dilemmas in the Victorian civil service, plus hopeful love stories.
10. Dr. Wortle's School. Like Orley Farm, this one looks at the question of well-intentioned people doing illegal things. Do they deserve opprobrium, sympathy, assistance? Does our perspective shift if the people who are technically in the right are icky and unpleasant?
11. Miss Mackenzie. What happens when a poor spinster inherits some money and becomes marriageable? 
12. The Way We Live Now. Justly famous, but painfully long and crammed full of unlikable characters.

I started my Trollope adventure in 2014 with the Barsetshire Chronicles, which I will reread someday. There are six of them, and I finished #6 in 2017. They are probably the best point of entry for the Trollope-curious. They can stand alone; I read #2 before #1 and it wasn't a problem at all. I read the six Palliser chronicles between the beginning of 2020 and the middle of 2022, and then resolved to head off into the depths of the back catalog.

Wish me luck! Only 23 novels to go!

In which I cross the halfway point

Today I finished Trollope novel #24, which means I have read more than half of the 47 novels he wrote. It feels like a bit of an accomplishment.

This was a small novel, less than 160 pages long, but I will remember it. Trollope writes a lot about marriage: what's it for, and what happens when people have competing ideas about it? How much should you marry for financial stability vs. companionship vs. capital-L Love vs. political or logistical reasons, in a culture where marriage and biological children determined the future of titles and estates? 

We're still chewing on some of these questions 150 years later, right? If you marry somebody from a wildly different background, is heartache inevitable? If someone's engagement seems to be a colossal mistake, what's the best response? 

Novel #24 was Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. It follows the trials of Sir Harry, "a mighty person in Cumberland," as his daughter bestows her affections unwisely. In some ways it is very much a Victorian relic. These days a parent would say, "No, you cannot marry your second cousin, because consanguinity is a terrible idea," rather than wondering if it might be a good idea to invite the second cousin for consideration as a marriage prospect. The unspeakably shameful acts that put the second cousin beyond the pale are lying and card-sharping, neither of which would be viewed as absolute dealbreakers in the 21st century. (In fact, James Bond plays the Duke of Cumberland bridge hand in one of the Ian Fleming books, and in my memory it's presented as proof of his versatility and ability to keep a cool head.)

The parts that I'll remember are the timeless bits, though: who can decide when a person is irredeemable? What happens when we pray for a person who appears irredeemable? Why do some people choose alcohol over the ones they love, and how should we respond to them? 

Trollope is much funnier than I expected him to be. He is said to have laughed himself to death, by reading a book he found so funny that he laughed until he had a stroke. This is a sad book, though. Sometimes you appear to have it all, and you wind up losing what's most important. Sometimes you do the best you can, and it's still not enough.

My invisibility cloak

This is the current state of my MKAL project:

It's quite something, isn't it? Stella is used to seeing it wadded up, with only the last bit poking out of my knitting bag, and as she watched me take this picture she said, "When you see it all spread out, it's very.. a lot." She's right: it is VERY a lot. I have one more fan wedge to go on the right side, and then probably the finishing instructions will involve a lot of I-cord edging.

I was manipulating the gradient of the self-striping yarn in one of the wedges, and I was fretting about whether I had changed the color too abruptly. "I might have made it look weird," I said plaintively as I surveyed the transition from dark blue-green to lighter blue-green. "Mom," said one of my children, gently and accurately, "you don't have to worry about making this thing look weirder than it already looks." We're pretty much at maximum weirdness here, are we not?

It is bigger than I am. It is vast-- an ocean of weirdness, a sea of strange. I will be able to swathe myself in it on the snowiest of days, as long as I wear sunglasses to protect myself from the blinding brightness of the colors.

I am calling it my invisibility cloak, because look:

(my arm is fully extended over my head in this picture) (but you'd never know that because I'm invisible)

It is so visually unexpected that if you saw it in the wild you wouldn't say, "Hm, is that a person behind that invisibility cloak?" No, you would just say, "Wow, that is a painfully vivid Thing over there and I don't have eye protection. I'd better look away now."

The pictures cannot begin to convey the brightness of the lime green. If I wear it outside, I might be deemed an environmental hazard. Picture me walking along the Gladlyville thoroughfares on a sunny day, blinding its citizens with my invisibility cloak. "Aaaiiieeee," they will shriek, fleeing to save themselves. "Out of my way!" I will thunder. "I spent all summer working on this thing and I'm going to wear it, dern it!"

(Except it is actually pretty itchy. We shall have to see how much wear it gets.)

Back to school

I've actually been back at school for two weeks now. But I went to secondary school in a district that always started at the beginning of September, and Labor Day still feels like a seasonal shift to me.

I have some September goals. I'm going to need to be flexible during the week of the next women's retreat, but that's a fairly small chunk of the month.

• Try a couple of new recipes each week, with a focus on eating a little lower on the food chain. Take leftovers to work for lunch.
• Run for at least 20 minutes 3 days per week, and lift twice a week. 
• Make the recording for the women's retreat team already.
• Finish Trollope novel #24 and two Allingham novels. 
• Finish the utterly bananapants mystery knit-along project. I'm hoping to have Part 4 done by the time the finishing instructions are released next week.
• Start every workday with 30 minutes of writing.
• Post at least ten times this month.

We'll see how it goes!

Oh! I forgot! One more: stay away from Facebook. Do not go there. The election madness is already intolerable.