13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rachel Ray, April 11, 2007
One must make allowences for the occasional sloppiness of Trollope's writing, given the serialized format and the incredible number of novels he wrote while working full-time for the post office. He always has something important to say and usually says it well. This novel is one of his shortest and one of his best. Like George Elliot and Charles Dickens, Trollope was dragged kicking and screaming into industrialized England in the 19th century. And, like them, he saw beneath the glitz and glamor of new-found wealth and the breakdown in social classes that followed the Reform movement in England. He seems at times to be overly preoccupied with the demise of the "lady" and the "gentleman," but this concern reveals a well-founded alarm over the vanishing of such Victorian values as "nobility" and "duty to others." In this novel he expresses many of those concerns while targetting the Evangelicals, an attack that is right-on and timely indeed. He reveals the hypocrisy of so many of those who are filled with resentment and hatred of their fellow humans while professing to bask in the love of Christ.
I would rate this novel, alongside The Warden, as first-rate and excellent ways to come to Anthony Trollope, who is, in my view, a vastly under-rated writer, despite his flaws.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Read anything else by Trollope before this..., March 20, 2005
Rachel Ray is (IMHO) the least of Trollope's longer works. Set in a pleasant country town, with a terribly pleasant cast of characters, the novel is, well, ..... pleasant .... without ever offering anything more for the reader. I suppose there are some who would say that Trollope's genius was to write a work that was as pleasant as its setting, but after seeing how good he is at social novels (e.g., The American Senator, The Way We Live Now) and more excitingly peopled romances (e.g., The Claverings) this book was, for me at least, a real let-down. The plot involves a young girl who is certain of the affections of her suitor even when (highly contrived) circumstances make it appear to all around her that he is, in fact, a jilt. Don't read this next sentence if you plan on reading the book: Surprise! Little Rachel was right all along and her lover in fact marries her. *YAWN!*
Along the way, there are a lot of fairly typical Trollopian subplots dealing with country families putting on town airs, modernization of the brewing industry, and other fun stuff that does illuminate nineteenth-century country life for the twenty-first-century reader. But none of it is particularly compelling, at least not for me.
Bottom line: I adore Trollope and have read most of his output, but if I were to rank his works Rachel Ray would be near, or even at, the bottom.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Beer and Evangelicals, February 14, 2012
Beer and evangelicals: that's what you'll find in Anthony Trollope's Rachel Ray.
What Luke Rowan cares about is brewing good beer. He inherits a portion of the brewery of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt, gentlemen who consistently made muddy, disagreeable beer. Naturally Mr. Tappitt objects to an upstart nephew suggesting ways to improve his beer. To Tappitt, beer is business; Luke thinks there is a great deal of poetry in brewing beer.
He is "a young man, by no means of the bad sort, meaning to do well, with high hopes in life, one who had never wronged a woman, or been untrue to a friend, full of energy and hope and pride. But he was conceited, prone to sarcasm, sometimes cynical, and perhaps sometimes affected." Perhaps the greatest compliment is that Luke "had the gift of making himself at home with people."
In the character of Dorothea Prime, Rachel's widowed sister, Trollope takes aim at pharisaical pietism. "Her fault was this: that she had taught herself to believe that cheerfulness was a sin."
Nice things aggravated her spirits and made her fretful. She liked the tea to be stringy and bitter, she liked the bread to be stale; --as she preferred also that her weeds should be battered and old. She was approaching that stage of discipline at which ashes become pleasant eating, and sackcloth is grateful to the skin. The self-indulgences of the saints often exceed anything that is done by the sinners.
Sweet Rachel Ray is the antithesis of her sister. "She walked as though the motion were pleasant to her, and easy,--as though the very act of walking were a pleasure." Rachel's sister wants to keep her cloistered at home, leaving only for church services and afternoon teas at Miss Pucker's house. Rachel protests, "If I was minded to be bad, shutting me up would not keep me from it."
Thus two views of marriage and courtship are at opposition. Trollope poses "that great question, What line of moral conduct might best befit a devout Christian?"
1) Marriage is the happiest condition for a young woman, and for a young man, too. And how are young people to get married if they are not allowed to see each other?
versus
2) Men and women, according to her theory, were right to marry and have children; but she thought that such marriages should be contracted not only in a solemn spirit, but with a certain dinginess of solemnity, with a painstaking absence of mirth.
I loved the storyline; I adored the writing. Phrases like "elated with dismal joy" and "she knew her mother must be appeased and her sister opposed" and "burial service over past unkindness" delighted me.
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