Customer Reviews

The Golden Lion of Granpere

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This little book (180pps) is certainly not Trollope's best. But even on this small stage we see displayed two of the author's favorite themes: the plight of women in a Victorian age who are treated like chattel and the conflict between inclination, on the one hand, and self-restraint and duty, on the other -- "aristocratic virtues" as de Tocqueville called them, and values we seem to have lost. We see Trollope's chauvanism at its worst, as the heroine must choose between the weak man her well-meaning uncle has selected for her and the "manly" man she prefers, the man who will be her lord and master and reduce her to the submissive position Trollope seems convinced women prefer.
But there is no one who saw more clearly, or felt more deeply, the agonies of a Victorian age (for all its faults) that was in its death throes, with capitalism and industrialism bearing down and the sense of something outside the self, something to whom or to which we have a duty, weakening in the face of self-absorption. The book is worth reading, but not as a sample of Trollope at his best. For that I recommend The Warden or, perhaps, La Vendée.