Margaret Stuart Lane

Spring had come to the West Country, a joyous spring laden with soft airs and odours of distant flowering lands, and filling the hearts of men with a restless delight. It seemed impossible not to be happy, with a blue sky flecked by little clouds running down to meet a blue sea, the hedgerows gleaming with blackthorn, and the pink tips of the beeches shining in the sun. Children were out in the copses, picking primroses; farmers counted their lambs in the pasture, and down in the harbour sailor boys watched the rising tide and were all impatience to be aboard.

It happened that the undersigned spent the last Christmas season in a foreign city where there were many English children. In that city, if you wanted to give a child’s party, you could not even get a magic-lantern or buy Twelfth-Night characters — those funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen, the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy, the Captain, and so on — with which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this festive time.

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister Unnamed' in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion, The Betrothed's exploration of love, power and faith presents a whirling panorama of seventeenth-century Italian life and is one of the greatest European historical novels.

I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they  were in my youth.  Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches,  carrying six inside, and making a two days' journey out of what  people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and  a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one.

SOON after sunrise, on a cloudy morning in the year 1881, a special messenger disturbed the repose of Dennis Howmore, at his place of residence in the pleasant Irish town of Ardoon. Well acquainted apparently with the way upstairs, the man thumped on a bed-room door, and shouted his message through it: “The master wants you, and mind you don’t keep him waiting.” The person sending this peremptory message was Sir Giles Mountjoy of Ardoon, knight and banker. The person receiving the message was Sir Giles’s head clerk. As a matter of course, Dennis Howmore dressed himself at full speed, and hastened to his employer’s private house on the outskirts of the town.

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Some forty years ago the commencement and partial preparation of this work assisted to beguile the tedium of a winter’s residence from home, where even Orange and Magnolia groves with the novel vegetation of a semi-tropical region, could scarcely dispel the ennui attending a life of idleness.

The novel takes place in the utopian community of Blithedale, presumably in the mid-1800s. The main character, Miles Coverdale, embarks on a quest for betterment of the world through the agrarian lifestyle and community of the Blithedale Farm. The story begins with Coverdale's chat with a character named Old Moodie, who reappears throughout the story. The legend of the mysterious Veiled Lady is introduced; she is a popular clairvoyant who disappears unannounced from the social scene. Coverdale then makes the voyage to Blithedale, where he is introduced to such characters as Zenobia and Mr. and Mrs. Silas Foster. At their first community dinner they are interrupted by the arrival of Hollingsworth, a previous acquaintance of Coverdale's, who is carrying a frail, pale girl. Though Hollingsworth believes the girl (whose age is never clarified) is an expected guest, none of the Blithedale citizens recognize her. She immediately develops a strong attachment to Zenobia, and reveals her name to be Priscilla. Soon after, Coverdale becomes severely ill and is bedridden. Hollingsworth takes care of him, as does Zenobia, and he returns to health shortly. However, during his sickness, he believes he is on the brink of death and develops a closeness with Hollingsworth due to their anxiety-ridden situation and discussion of worldly ideals. As he recovers and spring comes, the residents of the community begin to work the land successfully and prove to their neighbors the plausibility of their cause. Priscilla starts to open up, and relationships between the other characters develop as well. Tension in the friendship between Coverdale and Hollingsworth intensifies as their philosophical disagreements continue. Meanwhile, Zenobia and Hollingsworth become close and rumor flies they might build a house together. Mr. Moodie makes a reappearance and asks about Priscilla and Zenobia for reasons to be revealed later. Coverdale then meets a stranger who turns out to be a Professor Westervelt. Westervelt asks also about Zenobia and Hollingsworth. Coverdale does not like the Professor, and when he is retreating in a tree he overhears the Professor talking to Zenobia implying that they have a prior relationship.

Spring had come to the West Country, a joyous spring laden with soft airs and odours of distant flowering lands, and filling the hearts of men with a restless delight. It seemed impossible not to be happy, with a blue sky flecked by little clouds running down to meet a blue sea, the hedgerows gleaming with blackthorn, and the pink tips of the beeches shining in the sun. Children were out in the copses, picking primroses; farmers counted their lambs in the pasture, and down in the harbour sailor boys watched the rising tide and were all impatience to be aboard.

Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. Increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation, her situation is contrasted with that of her friend Lady Glencora - forced to marry the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser in order to prevent the worthless Burgo Fitzgerald from wasting her vast fortune. In asking his readers to pardon Alice for her transgression of the Victorian moral code, Trollope created a telling and wide-ranging account of the social world of his day.

My dear A.E.—I dedicate this book to you because, whether you think it well or ill written, you will sympathize with the sorrows and the ecstasies of its personages, perhaps even more than I do myself. Although I wrote these stories at different times and in different manners, and without any definite plan, they have but one subject, the war of spiritual with natural order; and how can I dedicate such a book to anyone but to you, the one poet of modern Ireland who has moulded a spiritual ecstasy into verse?