Back to the Classics #13

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Tragic Novel. Trollope’s late novels are not the genial vacation novels of the Chronicles of Barsetshire. Readers then and now seem to prefer the early and middle period novels over stories with darker tones and themes such as The Way We Live Now (1875). Good thing we avid readers aren’t most readers. Plus, he sets this one in Ireland, where he lived in the brutal famine-stricken 1840s, so he's sympathetic to the hard-pressed Irish. As Mia Farrow's Irish character said in Widow's Peak (1994), "Even when the English are murdering you, they're always thorough gentlemen."

An Eye for an Eye – Anthony Trollope

Trollope despised surprises so in chapter one he tells of an inmate in a private asylum who mutters to herself over and over “An eye for an eye” and makes us wonder what drove the poor woman mad and why the Earl of Scroope pays the bill.

The rest of the two-volume novel tells the back-story. A young Englishman is about to inherit his uncle’s vast estate. Stationed by the army in Ireland, he meets a beautiful but poor Roman Catholic Irish girl. Her protection is comprised of a formidable mother and canny practical priest, both finely drawn characters. But true love is thwarted by prejudices involving class snobbery, money, station, nationality, religion, and colonial ambitions as personified in the Englishman’s aunt, another great character. 

I hesitate to describe the plot or incidents in detail out of fear of spoiling this powerful novel for another reader. I highly recommend it to fans of Trollope who think they can always see Tony’s tricks coming. This is decidedly not yet another examination of yet another weak male who makes trouble for himself and others on the order of Charlie Tudor, Harry Clavering, and Johnny Ames. Things work out but tragically – the title says expect revenge; the first chapter cautions us the story ends in madness – and that’s probably why it’s read nowadays only by hard-core readers like us that dearly like a sad story.