In the Library
The Small House at Allington
Anthony Trollope, 1864
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 19 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 60
- Length
- Length 256k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope
Go back to the cathedral close of the same Barsetshire, where Trollope first made church politics and courtship as gripping as any war.
£1.99
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Wharton's Newland Archer chooses the proper match over the woman he loves, and old New York watches the cost as quietly as Allington does.
£1.99
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Austen does the same thing, but grants the constant woman what Trollope withholds, and makes eight silent years of waiting feel like a held breath.
£1.99
About the book
There are two houses at Allington, and the smaller one holds a widow and her two daughters, living rent free on the bounty of an uncle who does them good turns and cannot manage a warm word. For one summer the younger daughter is engaged, radiantly and in front of everybody, to a clever man up from London. Then he spends a fortnight at an earl's castle and comes home the property of somebody else. What Anthony Trollope does with the months after that is the thing readers have argued about ever since. He will not let the jilted girl be pitiable. She forgives the man who ruined her, goes on loving him without a word of apology, outshines everybody at her sister's wedding, and tells her mother in the flattest voice in Victorian fiction that in her heart she is married already and cannot be married twice. Trollope came to find her exasperating and called her a prig. His readers loved her better than anyone else he ever made.