Lilly, Lady Laura, and poor Mabel
Anthony Trollope's Achilles Heel

Trollope has two problems. The most overt one--so overt it requires no discussion here--is his unthinking depiction of various minorities as nasty, greasy, immoral people. Jews get by far the worst treatment, but foreigners of various sorts are not far behind--including Americans, save the one nod in The Duke's Children.

The second problem has been noticed by other readers--in fact, it is pointed up by a male reader of the later Victorian generation, who insists that this problem is unique in Trollope's work--Sir Edward Marsh. He discusses it briefly in his introduction to CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?--indicating that perhaps Victorian audiences were just as disappointed as modern ones when Lilly Dale refuses to marry faithful Johnny Eames after the suicide of her villainous husband Mr. Crosbie.

Trollope does relent at the eleventh hour on behalf of Emily Wharton of THE PRIME MINISTER, and his comic widows, such as Mrs. Greenow in CAN YOU FORGIVE HER? are bound by no such Noble Sentiment--they can remarry without remorse, and even live to enjoy it! But Lilly Dale, Lady Laura Standish, and Lady Mabel Grex are allowed no such compassion.

Sir Edward laments that Lady Laura's plight, which stretches the length of two novels--the Phineas Finn ones--bog the reader down tremendously. It's true that her one-note misery becomes tedious in the extreme. If one skims through, there is an interesting issue raised, all the more interesting because there is no overt discussion whatsoever: and that is, what happens when a proper virgin, who innocently marries without any knowledge of what marriage Really Means, finds that the man is physically repulsive to her? One can find hidden discussions of this in numerous Victorian novels, written by both men and women. It was a real problem, I suspect; in a system where a young woman might get married when she's not even remotely emotionally mature enough to decide, with no awareness of the sexual nature of marriage, a very rude awakening no doubt awaited her, and unlike today, there was no divorce for "incompatibility"--not unless she was willing to be utterly and permanently ruined.

This theme takes up much of Wives and Daughters, Mrs. Gaskell's brilliant last novel--kept, I firmly believe, from its place beside Middlemarch (which was inspired by it) because the author died before the last chapter could be completed. There are traces of it in other books.

The issue of a woman staying true to her first love certain is explored in Jane Austen's work. One can even make a case for her conviction that a woman can't really be happy afterward; many readers certainly feel that Marianne Dashwood, though settled in riches and plenty with her adoring Colonel at the end of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, doesn't really seem happy, but resigned.

Of course a quick nod has to be made to the women who transgress sexually without benefit of marriage, whether they love or not. During the nineteenth century is was accepted by both men and women authors that such characters have to die miserably by the last page--even if there plight is presented with some sympathy, as Mrs. Gaskell attempted to do in her melodrama MARY BARTON. (And she was roundly criticized for so doing.)

Trollope's solution to the problem of an unsuccessful first love is that the woman must pay by retiring from society to be alone with her misery, and he forces this fate onto these three heroines.

Lady Laura and Lilly Dale Crosbie actually did get married. Lady Mabel Grex never got that far--she adores her cousin Frank, but refuses him because they are both poor, and she knows they would not be happy on a pittance. So he recovers and goes on to fall in love with Lady Mary Palliser, and Lady Mabel does try to snag the rich Lord Silverbridge, but misses him--and she spends the rest of the novel becoming increasingly more bitter against Frank for not remaining in love with her, and suffering right alongside her. There's a telling passage in which the author would have us know that she, despite her beauty, shows the effects of her impure heart. She's not so fresh--she's got a soiled patina about her. It's a fairly poisonous authorial intrusion, and overshadows the more interesting passage when Lady Mabel realizes that because she does know what love is, she could never bear to go to bed with a man she doesn't love. Interesting, complex, beset by a real problem, she seems real, and it's too bad the author saw fit to then force her into a contrived mold in order to make his point. And I think it's this kind of thing that keeps his otherwise engaging novels from being truly great.