rochicks

I've been reviewing Trollope's novels in the order they were published (in book form), which is not always the order in which they were written. An Old Man's Love is the last of Trollope's novels to be published, but The Landleaguers is the last he wrote. In fact, he had barely made it into the 49th of a planned 60 chapters when he had the stroke that ended his writing and, shortly thereafter, his life. For The Landleaguers Trollope returns to Ireland, the setting of several of his other novels, including the first two. In fact he toured Ireland with his amanuensis-niece in preparation for writing The Landleaguers. The earlier Irish woe Trollope had chronicled was the potato famine, now it's the often bloody conflict between English protestants and Irish Catholics. Trollope loved Ireland and his novels often reflect that, but The Landleaguers, with its realistic depiction of terrorism, seems to despair of Ireland's future. There is a subplot involving the daughter of an American supporter of the Irish campaign against the English; the daughter has come to London to further her career and there are sexual intrigues there. (This subplot is not as unrelated to the main plot as this summary makes it appear.) Trollope's son Henry wrote a brief foreword to the novel and added a two-sentence postscript announcing the fates that Trollope had planned for the novel's main characters.

2023-02-20 08:56