Customer Reviews

Rachel Ray (Oxford World's Classics)

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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.

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.