AN OLD MAN'S LOVE by Anthony Trollope

Mr William Whittlestaff, once crossed in love, has resigned himself to being single and entering a dignified old age, but when he takes in his old friend's daughter Mary Lawrie as a ward, he finds himself falling for her.

A fifty-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old woman dependent on him for her daily bread in a rather misogynistic time and place reads as pretty creepy to the twenty-first century, even though we understand that fifty and twenty-five are both ages of potentially consenting adults.

Mary's other love interest John Gordon is more age-appropriate to her but also unpleasant to the modern eye - he made his fortune in the colonially exploitative Kimberley, a place described with racist language in the book. (Insert usual disclaimer that Trollope was A Man Of His Time. So was Frederick Douglass.) Yet the author's intention is that Gordon's a good person at heart.

Possessive undereducated housekeeper Mrs Baggett is more interesting than the anodyne Mary Lawrie, whose character type reoccurs in VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON (Mary Lowther!) and THE AMERICAN SENATOR (Mary Masters) and SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON (Lily Dale) - and that's just off the top of my head. Mary is sympathetic, a young woman being pressured to marry without love when the person she really loves seems almost out of reach, but Trollope's written her before and she didn't have much depth then either. Mrs Baggett, on the other hand, has a more interesting range of complexes, pressuring Mary to accept her master's hand in marriage but refusing to stay housekeeper when Mary is official mistress, and a tragic backstory (a very dysfunctional husband). Trollope translates Baggett's lack of education into a lack of intelligence, which isn't a great trope, but she still appeals as an interesting and plausible enough character. Baggett's also good at preaching patriarchy: men are to have everything they want (but she's still going to make herself very much felt while preaching this).

Trollope treats the "old man" quite harshly; perhaps that's because of honesty. It's hard not to assume that Trollope identifies more with the fifty-year-old man than the thirty-year-old. According to this blog, Trollope's inspiration may have been his feelings for American feminist Kate Field. There's this bit in the Autobiography: There is a woman, of whom not to speak in a work purporting to be a memoir of my own life would be to omit all allusion to one of the chief pleasures which has graced my later years. In the last fifteen years she has been, out of my family, my most chosen friend. There's pathos and dignity around the old man in the novel's eventual choice to move himself out of the way.

Occasional doses of clerical sarcasm enliven this book, as also expressed in THE AMERICAN SENATOR:

If he [Rev. Montagu Blake] were to go out to Kimberley, no one would pay him a guinea a-week. But he will perform the high work of a clergyman of the Church of England indifferently well."

And there is sort of a Furnival cameo from ORLEY FARM - that is to say, the squire character with four daughters is introduced as Furnival, before his name is changed to Mr Hall for the rest of the text. (The ORLEY FARM Furnival was a lawyer with one daughter and a very interesting relationship with his wife.)

This novel, as very many other of Trollope's, use the "fall in love and stay in love or else" trope. It made me long for Trollope's version of the "love the one you're with - love can come gradually" story - which is more or less what happens to Lady Glencora in the Palliser novels. In this setting, though, the alternative to marrying for love is to marry someone you don't love for money and hope like hell you can tolerate them - the fate of Julia Brabazon in THE CLAVERINGS being a tragic example. Trollope's lead female characters are typically dependent on marriage for survival but refuse to marry where they do not feel attraction. In this particular volume, it would be reasonable to tell Mary that she should move on from her young boyfriend who's probably not coming back and find someone else (the novel, of course, actually makes him come back); but she clearly hasn't moved on, and isn't going to marry the titular old man. This view on life is idealistic, but idealism can be preferable to many alternatives.

Of course it is a sign of social progress that Trollope writes about marriage as inextricable from love and attraction. This kind of schema - in this era marriage determines your survival if you're a woman, and even so you should only marry if you can find someone both financially responsible and who makes you feel tingly inside and vice versa - is what led to gay marriage. When marriage becomes all about mutual attraction and commitment rather than property trading or convenience, then it becomes obvious that gay people should have equal rights to a spouse they love.

This is a short volume but it does what it sets out to do. I think that Mrs Baggett wins the prize for the most interesting character - Mary and John Gordon are generically good young people, and Whittlestaff is considerably fleshed out but also a little icky. Extremely admirable in showcasing Trollope's incredible work ethic; not otherwise distinguished among his novels. This one was actually his last completed novel, finished before the incomplete LANDLEAGUERS.