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I thought this was a good read. Like many of you, I thought it a cross between Jane Austen and Dickens with its subtle humor and focus on marriage among the gentry combined with more wide-ranging social commentary in the person of the senator.
Despite a gap of about sixty years, almost they could have been Jane Austen heroines. Except for the trains! When you think of what a major event the picnic to Box Hill was for Emma, and compare it to Mary Masters’s train trip with Reginald—the world is opening up for the women, even if slowly. And Arabella’s day trip to confront Rufford demonstrated an agency impossible for an Austen girl. Tragic and humiliating, but powerful for all that.
I don’t think anyone had any doubt that things would work out well for Mary. Arabella’s story was so much more compelling and even brutal, compared to the world of Austen, and no assurance of a happy ending, as I hoped that things would work out with John Morton, alas, poor Paragon. The depiction of Arabella’s acrimonious relationship with her mother was a level of reality beyond the Bennet girls’ frustration with their mother.
I liked Arabella. I liked her courage, her ability to move on. And yet, I could spare a thought for Lady Augustus and even the second Mrs. Masters, cruel though she was to Mary. The older women knew, in their bones, that things might not work out, that the attitude of a young girl of a world well lost for love, was nothing compared to decades of wondering how you were going to live. The last portrait of Lady Augustus, leaving alone for London and an unknown future, was chilling, although I suspect the Duke had sufficient family feeling that she wouldn’t starve, quite. She was callous and conniving, but we can understand her attitude that selling her daughter for £8,000 pounds was a consolation prize worth having. As the old joke goes, they had established what Arabella was, the rest was just negotiating price. Once there was no hope of marriage, Lady Augustus felt compelled to take what she could get. What that sum would have meant to her!
Poor Arabella. It sounded as if it was going to be rocky times for a while with Mr. Green. I can only hope that he returned eventually to be a power in the Foreign Office in a more salubrious spot, where Arabella could shine.
Even as an American, I liked Gotobed, which isn’t always the case with Americans as portrayed by English writers. Trollope got him right, and he was fair, not what I expected going into the story, given his mother’s attitude. Gotobed was rude in the obtuse and not malevolent sense, and motivated by generosity and a willingness to call things as he saw him. I was charmed that Trollope used him as his agent to criticize English society.
So that’s a bunch of scattershot impressions. I’m glad that overall people seemed to enjoy the book.
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