Can You Forgive Her?

Trollope stops his own story to ask you, straight out, whether you can forgive his heroine. Her offence fits in a sentence: engaged to a good man, she changed her mind and promised herself instead to a cousin who wanted her money for an election. Nobody dies and nothing breaks that money cannot mend, yet around that one refusal the novel opens onto the largest question a Victorian woman was permitted to ask, and puts it in the book's own plain words: what should a woman do with her life? In the great houses beside her sits a young wife married off to a man she does not love, counting the hours until she can throw it all away on the one she does. Trollope watches both women with an attention so patient it turns into tenderness. He never condemns them; he only keeps asking whether you will.