In the Library
Framley Parsonage
Anthony Trollope, 1861
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 48
- Length
- Length 208k words
£1.99
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There is no cholera, no yellow-fever, no small-pox more contagious than debt.
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Middlemarch ruins a provincial doctor by debt in much the same way, but Eliot is graver about it and far less willing to forgive her town.
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Pride and Prejudice
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Lucy Robarts refuses the young lord until his mother comes to ask her herself, and Austen's Elizabeth faces down Lady Catherine in the same contest of a proud matriarch and a clever girl.
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About the book
Two men are standing in the yard of a quiet country parsonage, taking an inventory of everything the vicar owns, and the cook has sent word that if they are given their meals and some beer they will be quite civil. He had signed a friend's bill for four hundred pounds, once, in a warm room after a good dinner, because refusing would have looked ungracious. Anthony Trollope understood exactly how ruin arrives: not as catastrophe, but as a small politeness you were too flattered to decline, renewed and renewed until it walks up your own gravel. Beside that slow disgrace stands the vicar's sister, whom the great lady of the parish calls insignificant to her own son's face, and who refuses that son with a pride so absolute it is almost a cruelty to herself. No English novelist has ever been kinder to weak people, or less willing to spare them the bill.