Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope, 1865

Women in Can Your Forgive Her? have trouble with marriage. Alice Vavasor, the her of the title, loved her paternal cousin, but sensed life with him would not be smooth, and broke the engagement. She recovered with a wealthy squire, but her senses now point in the opposite direction, and she breaks with him because she feared her life would be too smooth and featureless. In rebound she ends up back with her cousin, who has, in the meantime, become the scoundrel she sensed him to be.

Alice’s paternal aunt Arabella Vavasor married well-off and old, and was left a youngish, rich widow. She attracts two suitors, a prosperous, highly-self-regarding farmer and an impoverished, ne’er-do-well soldier. The two suitors battle it out, while the widow referees and tries to decide which, if either, of them she will marry.

Alice’s maternal cousin, Glencora M’Cluskie, the second richest women in Britain, is deeply in love with a spend-thrift wastrel. Her family, horrified, breaks up the couple, and marries her to the future Duke of Omnium, an extremely wealthy dry stick who’s almost entirely concerned with his future in government. Glencora’s unrequited longing for her first lover, and her husband’s emotional obtuseness, threaten to shake her to pieces.

These are the problems Trollope sets up in Can You Forgive Her? They seem like problems of love and marriage, and they are to some extent, but the real problems are the ones underneath, driving everything: money and the question of what a woman can do. All three women have enough money to make them independent: Alice comfortably so, Glencora fabulously so and Arabella somewhere between them. Their independence lets them reconfigure their relation with men to make it more equal and more responsive to their needs in the relation. In this sense the rankings are revised: Arabella is set fabulously, playing the game for all it’s worth; Glencora has nothing, crushed between two families; and Alice wavers between them, exercising her independence, but unable to decide and unhappy with the pressure to have to decide.

Trollope goes at all this with wide scope and fine detail. Arabella is brassy and right out in front; there’s no doubt what she’s doing. Glencora is equally relentless but more sedate, going after everything, especially her husband’s propriety, with petulant brattiness that is as amusing to watch as it is ineffective. Alice is the subtlest of the three, uncertain of her choices and of her decisions, requiring attention to the hints and shades Trollope puts around her to delimit her character. There’s plenty more going on in the story too; depending on how an e-reader handles it, the story is from 750 to over 800 pages long. Alice’s scoundrel cousin creates much plot: running for Parliament (Forgive is the first in the six-novel Parliamentary, or Palliser, series), fighting with his grandfather over inheritance, repeatedly confronting Alice’s other suitor. But despite the external ferment, the action takes place internally, where desires and social conventions grapple to reach a conclusion satisfactory to all.