The Brooknerian

Aurora Floyd is an heiress, handsome and rich, with a native cleverness. A year of her life is mysteriously missing, but this is 1860s sensation fiction and the seasoned reader will spot the clues. When she marries a bluff young landowner all seems set fair, till a face from her past appears and the secrecy and double-dealing run out of control. Written hot on the heels of M. E. Braddon's other famous bigamy novel, Lady Audley's Secret , Aurora Floyd is a fast, racy, slangy read. Its atmospherics are notably creepy; Braddon, like Wilkie Collins, is a very visual writer. The novel builds to a climax set in high summer: Braddon is brilliant at night scenes. She owes debts to Dickens too in her fondness for low eccentrics and detailed lists. The higher-class scenes feel a little like Trollope. But of course Trollope also sometimes sounds a little like Braddon, or at least he does in The Eustace Diamonds , his own attempt at the sensation genre. Except that Trollope is too honest, ...

From The Vicar of Bullhampton , another delicately spiced character sketch to break up your day: He was a very handsome man, about six feet high, with large light grey eyes, a straight nose, and a well cut chin. His lips were thin, but his teeth were perfect,—only that they had been supplied by a dentist. His grey hair encircled his head, coming round upon his forehead in little wavy curls, in a manner that had conquered the hearts of spinsters by the dozen in the cathedral. It was whispered, indeed, that married ladies would sometimes succumb, and rave about the beauty, and the dignity, and the white hands, and the deep rolling voice of the Rev. Henry Fitzackerley Chamberlaine. Indeed, his voice was very fine when it would be heard from the far-off end of the choir during the communion service, altogether trumping the exertion of the other second-rate clergyman who would be associated with him at the altar. And he had, too, great gifts of preaching, which he would exercise once a we...

What a joy is this passage from Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton. I love the sideswipe at Dickens, and the bit about Wycherley's plays is a sophisticated treat. As to Miss Marrable herself nobody could doubt that she was a lady; she looked it in every inch. There were not, indeed, many inches of her, for she was one of the smallest, daintiest, little old women that ever were seen. But now, at seventy, she was very pretty, quite a woman to look at with pleasure. Her feet and hands were exquisitely made, and she was very proud of them. She wore her own grey hair of which she showed very little, but that little was always exquisitely nice. Her caps were the perfection of caps. Her green eyes were bright and sharp, and seemed to say that she knew very well how to take care of herself. Her mouth, and nose, and chin, were all well-formed, small, shapely, and concise, not straggling about her face as do the mouths, noses, and chins of some old ladies—ay, and of some young ladies ...

Seeking solace can be a tricky business. As the news worsened I immersed myself in the novels of the past; but the serpent of unease wriggles beneath the seemingly most innocent of flowers. Yet literature is perhaps only great when it is also subversive. Scott's Quentin Durward depicts a young Scottish gentleman abroad in the forests of fifteenth-century France. So far so sylvan and romantic, but Scott has other ideas: at pains to emphasise the anachronism of Durward's devotion to chivalry in a world of low politics that has left such ideals behind. Trollope's The Warden should be safer territory, I thought. I read it years ago. Indeed it retains much charm: Trollope, we might recall, conceived the novel while wandering one midsummer evening the tranquil environs of Salisbury Cathedral. But modernity intrudes, the eschewing of tradition and the beginnings of a soulless corporate sensibility in Mr Harding's ejection from his comfortable but unjustifiable war...

A measure of the addictiveness of an author is the quantity of legendary material that surrounds her. Dickens does not inspire the Dickensian life, nor Trollope the Trollopian. One doesn't long to be subject to a Bildungsroman , living in a world where everyone has a funny name*; nor to be a provincial clergyman or a British parliamentarian. But one follows yearningly the course set out by Brookner, odd and unique as it may prove. She is uncompromising: this is the life, and it is the only life to live. To Germany again, for she perversely visited small towns and cities in France and Germany, the more obscure the better. To Karlsruhe, to the Staatliche Kunsthalle, where I saw a Hans Baldung Grien exhibition... ...along with favourites from the permanent collection: this Temptation of St Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck... ...and this Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Loose Living : The St Anthony , one of the most arresting paintings, is hidden away and uncelebrated. You ca...

Too often disappointing, sometimes one's reading truly works, in the way it worked in childhood. How often as an adult does one experience that? When I first read Hotel du Lac , at seventeen, one summer. When I read The Small House at Allington , another summer, in Rome. When I read Anthony Powell, tears smarting in my eyes in an Amsterdam hotel breakfast-room as I learned, via a throwaway remark, of poor Stringham's death. Rereading almost never matches up. Or else one identifies with new things. In Great Expectations I am cold now to the story of Pip's love for Estella. But I break down when Pip tells Magwitch, at the last, that his lost child lives and is now a lady. Or when old Pip returns to the forge to find Jo and Biddy and their own little son - and Pip sees himself: 'sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was - I again!' Guilty reading can be compulsive too. I'm halfway through May at 10 , Anthony Seldon's almost day-by-day account ...

The novel of sensation, that mid-Victorian phenomenon typified in the novels of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and, to an extent, Dickens ( Great Expectations ) and Trollope ( The Eustace Diamonds ), grew out of the earlier success of the Gothic novel, though now the terror and disruption are domesticated, rooted in the modern world of the 1860s: railways, the telegraph, suburbs, the anxious middle classes and the rising lower orders. East Lynne , Wood's breathless blockbuster of 1860, tells a story of murder, jealousy and unwise alliances. There are aristocrats, but they're on the way out. Like Collins, Ellen Wood knows better the grimy world of the middle classes, of anonymous uncertain suburbia. The novel is fast, slangy, sloppy, trashy - quintessentially 'sensational'. Anita Brookner, a regular reviewer in the highbrow journals, once in a way was given a little something to tickle her fancy. Can we believe she was asked to write about ...

So the English summer ends in a blaze of unwonted heat, and I reflect on my reading. In Switzerland I read Henry James, as followers will have noted. I'm still a little puzzled as to why I didn't get on with Confidence . I'm presently reading The American , which is earlier still, and it is a pure pleasure. Every page, every line, has something to savour. I can't quite decide whether I've read it before. It's the classic 'International Theme' novel in which American manners clash with the ways and mores of old Europe. I would like to have read Confidence in a revised form, but it doesn't exist: James didn't include the novel in his New York Edition. The version of The American one chooses to read is, I think, crucial - it affects one's reading experience and even says a little about one's character. Absolutely I favour the later version. The differences between an early James and its revised form are in evidence practically everywhere...

Carl Spitzweg, Engl änder in der Campagna , 1845, Berlin Having read and enjoyed Scott's The Talisman , set in the Middle East, I next selected Trollope's  The Bertrams  from my shelves a) because it's also partially set in the Holy Land and b) because it's by now one of the few Trollopes I haven't read. It's a mark of age to have made such headway into so massive an oeuvre. I never thought, when I began, that I'd make it this far. Earliest Trollope ( The Bertrams (1959) is number eight) plus a few oddities from later (e.g.  The Landleaguers  and  The Vicar of Bullhampton ) remain for another year. Will I ever read La Vendée ? You can never tell. One book leads to another. Trollope was the best travelled of the Victorian novelists; he actually visited Jerusalem and its environs, which Scott never did (not that you'd know it from reading The Talisman ). The foreign episode in The Bertrams takes up a lengthy section near the start, and it is ver...

Reading Barchester Pilgrimage reminded me that we all construct our own versions of our favourite authors. Brookner was a Trollopian: she read him, she said, for decent feelings, and in her review of Victoria Glendinning's Trollope biography Brookner insisted any prospective reader must gain as an initial qualification a familiarity with every one of Trollope's forty-seven novels: a notion that seemed to me at the time, though not now, distant and exotic. She refers directly to Trollope in her 1996 novel Altered States, speaking in the voice of the narrator Alan Sherwood: Like Lady Stavely* in Orley Farm , my mother's favourite novel, 'She liked to see nice-dressed and nice-mannered people about her, preferring those whose fathers and mothers were nice before them.' Was Orley Farm Brookner's own favourite Trollope? It seems an odd choice: an early novel, with more than a few misfires. Or perhaps she just happened to be reading or rather rereading it wh...

About thirty years ago I worked in a library and was not a reader of Trollope. But, shelving, I grew familiar with titles. Our Trollopes seduced me with their covers, their titles, their quantity. Most were World's Classics editions, and years later I have assembled my own collection: I read Trollope over many years. I read the Barsetshire series haphazardly, retaining an impression lacking in detail. Barchester Pilgrimage (1935) is the work of a man of much more detailed (though not always accurate) Trollopian knowledge, Ronald A Knox, a well-known man of letters in his time, a Catholic priest, and the subject of a biography by Evelyn Waugh. It's essentially 'fan fiction'. Knox takes the characters from Trollope's novels and depicts their lives and those of their descendants in the later Victorian age and into the twentieth century. The book comprises six longish short stories: 'The Loves of Johnny Bold', a hobbledehoy's progress, is a lo...

Remainer? Brexiter? Here's a fun if rather silly way of beguiling the time. Henry James? Remainer. Dickens? George Eliot? Remainers. Thackeray? Brexiter. Trollope? Not sure about him. Sir Walter Scott? The knee-jerk response would be to say: High Tory, therefore Brexiter. But many such are Remainers. Scott exalted - indeed, exulted in - the notion of a United Kingdom. He championed the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian settlement. He cherished above all else the status quo that had been achieved, and was at pains to show how it might be, and had been, threatened. I confess my knowledge of Scottish history is sketchy. Before reading Old Mortality (1816) I had no idea the English Civil War in effect continued in Scotland into the 1670s and 80s. I didn't know about the Covenanters and the Killing Time. It was all new to me, and I was glad to be taught. Scott is brilliant at depicting periods of conflict and divided loyalties. Henry Morton, the son of a Civil War pa...

Shortly after Anita Brookner's death, Penguin reissued most of her novels with new covers. Most, but not all. Two novels from the 1980s, A Friend from England and A Misalliance , were missing, but they had been out of print for some decades. I don't know why exactly - except that in an interview in the 2000s Brookner described her early novels as 'crap', and also that she said disparaging things at least about A Misalliance at the time of its publication. But from the 2016 reissue there were several surprising absences. Where was Leaving Home , or Visitors ? Visitors (1997), in particular, has always been considered very highly. 'Almost certainly a masterpiece' - as Brookner once said of another author's novel. I notice similar things happening to the likes of Kingsley Amis. His novels, following a period of neglect after his death in the 1990s, have been reissued under the Vintage label: period classics. But not everything is there. I don't find ...

The Times , reviewing Trollope's John Caldigate at the time of its publication, reckoned it 'a good novel expanded into a dull one'. Trollope was usually writing for serial publication, and he was here. The chapters, accordingly, are regular in length, and a particular quantity was required. I don't know what Trollope's planning looked like, but I suspect it wasn't quite at the level of the chapter. He knew where he was going but there was a danger he might get there too quickly. Perhaps the last sixth of John Caldigate is markedly drawn-out. And yet I loved it. I never like saying farewell to characters. I like a long goodbye. I like discovering new things about them, perhaps unrelated to what has been their main function. I even don't mind meeting new characters so late in the day, though that's usually a novelist's no-no. So we find ourselves in London, with the Home Secretary, or lounging among legal eagles in gentlemen's clubs. Or we...

Having spent many years mentally time-travelling to Victorian England, I might feel I know it fairly well, its modes and mores, its customs and practices. But I think of the warning at the start of Michael Faber's novel The Crimson Petal and the White , as he guides his modern reader into the nineteenth-century past: 'You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well ... The truth is that you're an alien from another time and place altogether.' Do we need guides? On my e-reader I've a number of cheap 'complete works', which do without explanatory notes. I've read Dickens, James, Trollope in these editions, and seldom been flummoxed. I've tried the same with Scott, and quickly come a cropper. It isn't just the dialect words; it's the legal stuff. And it was a legal point that caused me minor grief while reading Trollope's John Caldigate . The major part of the novel takes place in the later 1870s. This isn...

Trollope for decent feelings , said Anita Brookner when asked whom she read and why. (And Dickens for indignation and James for scruple .) Anthony Trollope is often cited as a source of comfortable predictability, a salve for the troubled. He is certainly comfortable, even at times cosy. But predictable? John Caldigate  is a little-known standalone Trollope from near the end of the author's career. Like other Trollopes from this period, such as Is He Popenjoy? , it constantly veers off in surprising directions, taking the reader into unknown corners of the Victorian world. But Trollope was always unpredictable. His usual starting point, unlike Dickens or Wilkie Collins, wasn't a mystery, but a moral puzzle. A character has one of several choices to make. What will he or she decide? And when? And what will happen next? The variables multiply. The fascinated reader imagines an ever-branching tree of possibilities. John Caldigate seems at first a story about the conflict be...

Read Trollope . For decent feelings, she said. In her own novels she references  He Knew He Was Right and Orley Farm . I'm not keen on either. I love the later works, not all of which are the gloomy old things of repute. I think the likes of Ayala's Angel are among my favourite novels of any writer. Read Roth and Updike . And the rest of the great American warhorses. Brookner always made a thing of her devotion to these most unBrooknerian writers. She was putting it on a bit, no doubt; but she made a good case. Read Wharton . Brookner made a case for Wharton too. But I'm not sure she was right. She said she thought of herself as much more like Wharton than James. Again, I don't think she was right. Read Sebald . She valued Sebald's sudden emergence, fully formed, on to the literary scene. She liked especially his evocation of old-style life and feelings. For much the same reason, read Mann . The bourgeois past, European angst - and Switzerland. Read Stendha...

No wonder A Misalliance , when it was praised, as it was in the US, was called Jamesian. As the child Elinor is introduced in chapter 3 we get a flurry of literary vibrations: not just of James's Maisie but also, in her name, of Jane Austen, and in a mention of foundlings, of Tom Jones and Dickens's Esther Summerson. Blanche finds herself thinking with 'something like a creator's imagination'. One remembers James again, The Sacred Fount , and 'the joy of determining, almost of creating results'. It's a heady brew, and all the while there's the art: those nymphs in the Italian Rooms of the National Gallery, mocking Blanche's progress. Tiepolo, An Allegory of Venus with Time

[First in an occasional series on Middlemarch - Book by Book:] 'I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure either Felix Holt , Middlemarch , or Daniel Deronda ,' wrote Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography . Well, I'm not a young person any more, and when I first read Middlemarch , twenty-five years ago, I possibly wasn't the young person Trollope had in mind. In any case he probably had a minor axe to grid against the clever Mrs Lewes. Middlemarch is, after all, a Trollope novel deconstructed; it is The Last Chronicle of Barset with an advanced degree from Heidelberg; it's Barsetshire on acid (or laudanum at the very least). But it isn't, as Trollope goes on to say, an easy read. It is Eliot's style he criticises her for. It is affected, it lacks ease, he says. Style is the great Trollope thing: that sly tolerant tone keeping the reader company through the inevitable longueurs of a classic three-decker. Eliot's voice is altogethe...

It's funny what can put you off a book. Harold Macmillan, it is said, liked to go to bed with a good Trollope, and indeed was often of an afternoon to be found lolling around Downing Street with an old novel. (David Cameron emulated Macmillan - but he called it chillaxing, and Trollope probably wasn't involved.) I once went to a play in London about the Profumo affair, and the Macmillan character waxed patricianly lyrical about Trollope, saying he was currently flicking through Cousin Henry and finding it awfully jolly. I'm a bit of a Trollope fan, or I was once. In fact I've read most of his novels, but some time back. The ones I haven't managed are the early ones ( Castle Richmond and the like) and one or two from the later period that simply haven't appealed. Cousin Henry is one of these. It may be I just find its World's Classics cover slightly repellent. Cousin Henry is one of Trollope's shorter novels. This is actually a point in its di...