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!