Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T10:36:52.372Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

TURNING MOURNING: TROLLOPE'S AMBIVALENT WIDOWS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2015

Extract

Near the end of Anthony Trollope'sThe Small House at Allington (1864), the protagonist Lily Dale disagrees with her mother about the prospect of marrying Johnny Eames, an earnest, but perhaps too ardent graduate of hobbledehoyhood whom Lily finds herself both unwilling and unable to love. Having been jilted by Adolphus Crosbie, a social climber as naïve as he is disingenuous, Lily protests that marrying Johnny Eames would constitute a form of adultery. “In my heart I am married to that other man,” Lily contends, “I gave myself to him, and loved him, and rejoiced in his love” (630; ch. 57). Noting that the situation may have changed – Crosbie has since married a noble's daughter and run through her fortune – Lily nevertheless maintains that there “are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been” (631; ch. 57).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Sara.The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Anderson, Amanda. “Trollope's Modernity.” ELH 74.3 (2007): 509–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland.A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.Google Scholar
Bredesen, Dagni. “‘What's a Woman to Do?’: Managing Money and Manipulating Fictions in Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and The Eustace Diamonds.” Victorian Review 31.2 (2005): 99122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Peter.Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: A. A. Knopf,1984.Google Scholar
Calder, Jenni.Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Curran, Cynthia.When I First Began My Life Anew: Middle-class Widows in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Bristol: Wyndham Hall Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Gevirtz, Karen B.Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Jalland, Patricia.Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kilroy, James.The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kucich, John. “Transgression in Trollope: Dishonesty and the Antibourgeois Elite.” ELH 56.3 (1989): 593618.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levine, George. “Can You Forgive Him? Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and the Myth of Realism.” Victorian Studies 18.1 (1974): 530.Google Scholar
Luciano, Dana.Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Michie, Elsie B.A Woman of Money: Miss Dunstable, Thomas Holloway, and Victorian Commercial Wealth.The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope's Novels. Eds. Markwick, Margaret, Morse, Deborah D., and Gagnier, Regenia. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 161176.Google Scholar
Miller, D. A.Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. “Some Implications of Form in Victorian Fiction.” Comparative Literature Studies 3.2 (1966): 109–18.Google Scholar
Noble, Christopher. “Otherwise Occupied: Masculine Widows in Trollope's Novels.” The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope's Novels. Eds. Markwick, Margaret, Morse, Deborah D., and Gagnier, Regenia. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 177–92.Google Scholar
Overton, William J.Self and Society in Trollope.” ELH 45.2 (1978): 280302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rich, Adrienne, C.Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980).” Journal of Women's History 15.3 (2003): 1148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roof, Judith.Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Schor, Esther H.Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam, Frank. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Taylor, Lou.Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1983.Google Scholar
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. London: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her?. London: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Trollope, Anthony. The Last Chronicle of Barset. London: Oxford UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Trollope, Anthony. The Small House at Allington. London: Oxford UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Trollope, Anthony. The Warden. London: Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Trollope, Anthony. The Way We Live Now. London: Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar