Anthony Trollope’s North America: a travel book written on his trip during the course of civil war

(From an abridged edition)

Dear friends and readers,

After all, on Trollope&his contenporaries @ groups.io we’ve decided to read Trollope’s North America together. Anyone who wants to joinin is welcome

https://groups.io/g/TrollopeAndHisContemporaries/settings

Here is a schedule:

I have omitted the editors’ introduction to the 1951 edition, where to my shock, they say Trollope never concerned himself with slavery. As we go on, I hope to find some aware essays. This is just the dates. The link below takes you to here I put the postings for the previous read; you’ll see I invented chapter titles as signs of content

[http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/show.na.html](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/show.na.html)

A schedule for reading North America together

August 23: Volume 1, [Chapters 1-3](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.1-3.html)

August 30: [Chapters 4-6](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.4-6.html):
Sept 6: [Chapters 7-9](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.7-9.html)

Sept 13: [Chapters 10-12](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.10-12.html):

Sept 20: [Chapters 13-15](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.13-15.html):

Sept 27: [Chapters 16-17](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.16-17.html)

Sept 27: [Chapters 18-19](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.18-19.html):

Oct 4: Volume 2, [Chapters 20-21](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.20-21.html)
Oct 11: [Chapters 22-23](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.22-23.html):

Oct 18: [Chapters 24-25](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.24-25.html): Missouri, Cairo and Camp Woods

Oct 25: [Chapters 26-27](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.26-27.html):
Nov 1: [Chapters 28-30](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.28-30.html):
Nov 8: [Chapter 31](http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/northamerica.31.html)

Hypothetical:

We could read O’Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur for the month of November into December; then

Dec 13: For Christmas Trollope’s The Widow’s Mite, a civil war short story

Dec 20: Trollope’s The Two Generals a civil war short story set in Kntucky

Dec 27: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

Jan 3rd: We begin David Copperfield (Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a sort of sequel, won a Pultizer

One of the courses I signed up for online at one of the OLLIs (OLLI at AU) where I teach this fall is about the civil war era. Maybe it will enable me to offer informed comment as we go

The Title of the course: The American Civil War and Destruction of slavery

The American Civil War transformed American society, most dramatically by destroying slavery, the deeply entrenched and brutal institution that had been one of the nation’s most powerful political and economic forces since its founding. Although the class will include some review of the war’s military history—by far its most studied aspect—it will focus primarily on the events, forces, and developments that transformed the conflict from a war to preserve the Union into a struggle that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery.

Required and recommended books

Freedom National: The Destruction of American Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (James Oakes) | 2014: W. W. Norton & Company | ISBN: 978-0393347753 | Required

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (James M. McPherson) | 2003: Oxford University Press | ISBN: 978-0195168952 | Recommended

The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South (Bruce Levine) | 2014: Random House | ISBN: 978-0812978728 | Recommended

Ellen

Sort of Contra-Nolan’s Odyssey. I’m with Emily, Margaret, Christa, Madeline, Ursula, Simone & Alice

Anna Hathaway as the long-enduring wife, Penelope

I can see from the stills and clips of Anne Hathaway she is statuesque, deeply attractive in bed, aristocratically dressed, hair piled high, a modern recreation of the feminist Penelope taking down her husband’s bow by Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807)

Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), Penelope taking down Odyseuss bow

Sanantha Morton is a favorite actress for me; I’ve long thought her powerful, not to be missed

Samantha Morton as Circe in Nolan film – said to have stolen the scene, “electrifying,” “casts a spell”

There is a magnificent black Helen of Troy, Lupita Nyong’o, alongside her sister, as Clytemnestra, breaking the convention of equating beauty with sexy blondness (as in the unfortunate Marilyn Monroe, dead from an ovedose at 37). Hathaway and Nyong’o. will, like Aretha Franklin, “survive”

Lupita Nyong’o as young girl-like Helen of Troy

Dear friends and readers,

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey opened to a little qualified, shall I say relieved rave reviews (at Ebert, Jeff Yang?) and at this writing, it appears to be another of his stunning successes, financially too. The seriousness with which his art is teated may be seen in (Daniel Mendelssohn. “Artful Weaving, NYRB, 73:13 (August 2026). And Mendelssohn recognizes that Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” the inexhaustible determined but weary man is in effect Nolan’s compelling idea

@jcpoetry_

Replying to @tomilabenefield I agree, she’s wonderful 💜 Here she recites the final five lines of “Ulysses” in the movie Skyfall reminding us to be like James Bond and not yield in the face of adversity. #poem #poetry #judidench

♬ original sound – JCPoetry

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Mendelsohn patiently accepts that the dog who greets the long-gone but still recognized master ecstatically, must in the present pet-loving milieu be just adorable; Tom Holland look a loving son.

BUT to such noise, spectacle, driving loud music, visceral closeness

I prefer these books
Emily Wilson’s Odyssey,
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad,
Christa Wolff’s Medea, and her Cassandra & 4 Essays,
Madeline Miller’s Circe,
Ursula L Guin’s Lavinia,
Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force,
and Alice Oswald’s Memorial A Version of Homer’s Iliad,
Eavan Boland, afterword.

Not to omit, Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife. There is a very funny parodic clip on line (YouTube) of a stern Penelope seen loomingly by a man coming up to her, but stopping as she, exasperated, says, “seriously, ten years? …

And I am not unhappy not to be able to go (I am disabled) and have to join in by reading, teaching, going to classes on the above instead

So, why didn’t Emily Wilson like it? (“An uncomplicated Man,” London Review of Books, 48:14 (August 2026). He used her translation, and probably her book is selling in a way not possible without such a spectacular movie): You’d think she’d be grateful.

She says, at least when she went with her son, she wasn’t bored, which seems to imply she usually is bored by Odyseus and usually would not have gone but for her son. A boy’s movie. It’s that she (like me) prefers inward depth, simplicity, and she cites Umberto Pasolini’s The Return, with a “scarred, desperate mostly naked Ralph Fiennes, conflicted about his homecoming to a convincingly unhappy Juliet Binoche.” What she prefers. There area goodly number of female characters, and if not there for long, they are memorable. What Penelope does not like is the anachronism: Charlizee Theron’s Calypso is “never angry, never funny, nor skilled in rhetoric and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim; she’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled PTSD ridden Odysseus with drugs, graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.” It’s too over-the top. Noln has no quiet moments, and piles on numbers of whatever it is. This is dulling.

Why do I bring this movie up? Because unless a good friend takes me, I cannot go (see two blogs on my recent 5th min-stroke and the state of my left leg, I fell and for the first time could not get up; Another serious fall and momentary loss of consciousness fall-blackout). I need someone to help me in and out of a cab, to endure my slow walk, or turn my rollator into a wheelchair. It’s a responsibility. I have no teeth so the restaurant must be Italian, and so on.

Ergo, I have decided to make of this coda of a life even more for reading, watching study. I have read or assigned all of the above wonderful (ll very good, even the ungrateful Wilson’s), except for Ursula Le Guin (a retell of the Aeneid, in case you forgot the name of Aeneas’ wife, and his arranged marriage in the second half) and mean to go this way as long as my strength and mind holds out.

This summer it was Memory and Self: Women’s coming of Age Memoirs: Women’s real Milestones and Enemies of Promise, and I’ve thought of and two ongoing projects fpr my Reveries blog on omen’s art, the 18th century and Austen, all of which may last me to my coming end.

I wrote on my other two blogs about my back to Austen film adaptations (first up Pride and Prejudice and Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, Mary Bennet reconfigured, done justice to, with a Henry Tilney type reciting Wordsworth; and Outlander. They will replace the teaching eventually. And that I’m said to be a staff writer for my angelic and patient older daughter’s business venture online, Telly Visions.

So I’m introducing here the why, how, and what values and needs are now prompting me to continue this third blog. It is now hard for me to keep it up so I will also be writing fewer. Going forward, as people say, I will be more political, if indirectly.

I will bring this to a close with a spontaneous email letter I sent to a few lists (yes I am still posting to the few people who’ve remained faithful to reading together of listservsand FB sites). I hope it speaks for itslf

I thanked one Jeanne Thank you for bringing back the topic of The Odyssey in translation. I went on to talk about the importance and problem of translation and said in fall I had bought the above list of classical texts retold by women chaacyters in them by women authors.

Let me say first I have no Greek. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Wilson. I had gotten the impression that perhaps Wilson was very or over demotic. Not so, the prose reads naturally as by an educated writer. It does not announce itself as poetic either. But it’s not prose. Yesterday morning I found my “Homer” books (under H) and two copies I remembered reading. I first read the Odyssey as translated by Fitzgerald with an introduction by Bernard Knox (assigned in a year long class called Greek and Roman classics in translation; the lecturer Lilian Federman who wrote one of the Companions). For the Iliad we had Lattimore (seeming primitive) and C. Day Lewis for the Aeneid (polished). In graduate school I “came under the influence” (I don’t have a good phrase for what I mean) of Allen Mandelbaum. It was more than taking classes of Italian in translation by him. He taught a class on Dante’s Commedia using his own translation. I loved it, and discovered he translated from Latin too. It was his Aeneid I fell in love with. Also Salvatore Quasimodo (won a Nobel?).

Anyway I had bought his Odyssey: a verse translation in a Bantam paperback and enjoyed it very much, and it was from that one I felt the Odyssey was by a diffeent man or men, much more entertaining, varied than the Iliad which has long stretches of men killing one another, set pieces of killing, and the poet is not putting himself out to vary the language; these lists of things, names. It’s very violent. The Odyssey is more novel-like. So read Mandelbum’s Odyssey next to Wilson’s. I enjoy his more but she’s good, easier, more ordinary. This Mandelbaum Bantam Odyssey is still in print. For those who’ve got this far if you want a true for our time translation-adaptation of the semi-insane barbaric Iliad you can do no better than Weil’s and Oswald’s distillations, The Poem of Force and Memorials

Jim, as I’ve said, went to an English public school where Latin was forced on them, and I have his whole row of M.I. (Moses Israel) Finley books; Finley was American but ended at Cambridge, historian of the ancient world, classical scholar — and a dedicated communist. (He fled the US in 1950s the way someone today might flee Trump centered mindless fascist disguised partial dictatorship). Very witty. To me as well as Jim, Finley is fun and smcompatico to read. All this to recommend his World of the Odyssey. You don’t need to go to Nolan’s film.

An old BBC production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is very worth seeing. It’s on YouTube. Shakespeare’s brilliant satirical depictions of Ulysses (cunning political), Agamemnon (very dull) Troilus (a very young Anton Lesser as this unthinking young man). Many of the characters in Shakespeare’s play, you find in the Aeneid: remember he sails away for years too: the first half of Virgil’s poem rehearses the Odyssey type matter and the second relentless rage, violence, loss, Iliad-like matter, but unlike “Homer,” Virgil we know to have been a real man in the court of Augustus Caesar, and anti-war.

Ellen

Hannah Arendt: Six or so Shape-Shifting Elements of Totalitarianism (from her The Origin of)

A photo of Hannah Arendt, possibly in the 1940s, with her remark: “Monstrosities do not come out of nowhere”

Dea friends and readers,

I want to make some contributions to this 4th of July commemoration (I’ll call it), the so-called 250th birthday of the American republic, which emphasizes the day that The Declaration of Independence was sent off to the printed to be distributed wherever possible. Not that long ago, one of her acknowledged important books on the forms of political entities nation-states take, was published in a new more complete edition by the Library of America.

Around the occasion, the scholars who had worked together on this and other of her works organized conferences to explain what was in the book, and what they had done as editors. Happily it has been videoed and is now available to download for all.

Among the concise brief talks they gave was one by Seyla Berkowitz where she described 6 elements she discerned were major characteristics of the national socialist and Stalinist states that exercised enormous power in the 20th century. She argues these are found in all manifestations, but especially fascism. Given wha has been happening across he US since Donald Trump became POTUS for the 2nd time, to take dow her central setences and then off the one hour presentation, which includes remrks by David Bromwich, and Thomas Wild, with Max Ruden as introducer and moderated. In the video you will be told their titles, where they are professors and so on. Ruden opened the hour by pointing to “loneliness” as a repeated character trait found in people drawn to totalitarianism, they feel they don’t belong. (This reminds me of Simone Weil’s idea of the importance of “uprootedness” in the “malaise” found in many people in our time, and a consequent search for a sort of religion, group of certainties, a group where people recognize we owe each other obligations, have responsibilies in a relationship — unlike capitalism.)

Prof Berkowitz fist agreed with Arendt this kind of political organization was unprecedented (Carlo Levi suggests it originated in southern Italy in the later 19th century in Christ Stopped at Eboli).

There is a charismatic leader around whom a cult of worship forms. Any mass organizaion or party that existed before he arrived (leader usually male) is transformed into a group of obedient people who must espouse everything on his agenda. Elections may happen, but they are controlled (fixed, handled) to keep the leader in charge (so gerrymandering to win is fine).

The truth whether something occurred or describes probable reality or experience is subordinated to the agenda, beliefs, and needs of of the leader and the agenda. What is truth (or said to be truth) must cohere with or support whatever the leader wants to be true. All contradictions are eliminated This is justified propaganda which upercedes science if science denies the agenda or leader’s stances or respectability in any way. This propaganda is what matters. It’s today’s “operative truth” (remember Nixon’s press secretary?). Lawlessness is made lawful. Any law is interpreted to be subordinate to an ideology (say Christianity or Islam).

The building of many camps, like large detention centers. (US now taking over property everywhere, but espcially the lower south border. The basic purpose is to teroiz, instill such fear as will silence opposition called enemies) Eventually these states go to war to acquire more territory and dominate any region the are in. (We are seeing this with Israel invading occupyong southern Lebanon, parts of Syria, destroying Gaza, genocide of Palestinians; Russia invading Ukraine, a threa to European countries nearby)

Politics shapes and controls social life. State coerces all social life to obey agenda. The state remakes what is taught, in the minds of people. Docility is what’s demanded. People become less friendly with their neighbors. Your first duty is to the starte — before friends,family. Remember Forster’s ‘Shocking statemnt in’Wha I believe.

Sound familiar? The logic of Trump’s behavior is more than mad narcissism. He needs Greenland. He takes over the Kennedy center, renames it, for the July 4th “celebration,” chooses what is to be done. In full display, including deep fake photo of himself as superhuman.

Remarks: David Bromwich objected to “authoritarianism” as a vague euphemism; in debate it leaves fascism with with no understood opposition. Thomas Wilder suggested fascism seeks to transform human nature into what the leader and agenda says it is. (“There are only 2 sexes.”) Single events alone (without context) are truths that matter. (This is how Trump treats the insurrection he fomented, organized, led, and then, when it failed to arouse anyone else, described in words that suggest the opposite of what happened.)

Here is the video. If it won’t play or is somehow cancelled out, my summary tells you the important utterances and ideas.

This is my contribution to this year’s July 4th (2026)

Ellen

If you are unterested in Arendt, my other blogs about her: Margaretta Von Trotta’s film; A voice we must heed. I hope eventually to write about her friendship with Mary McCarthy.

For Juneteenth: Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “Paul Robeson”; American Masters PBS documentary, ” Here I Stand”

Paul Robeson, Birmingham Town Hall, 1939

One of our foremother poets, Young Heroes II:

Paul Robeson

That time
we all heard it.
cool and clear, cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice,
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River, forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning in music-words
devout and large. that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
— Library of America, American Poets Project, ed. Elizabeth James

Full episode from American Masters, PBS documentary series: Paul Robeson: Here I stand

The specific fact, a history of the actual day and then (ignored by whites & establishment until a few years ago) of the local Texas now national holiday, Bulwark, Substack (I recommend subscribing)

The holiday’s name refers to June 19, 1865, the day when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 ordering the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

******t***********************************
Separately, also from YouTube, the full opening ceremony of the Obama Cultural Center in south side, Chicago: all previous living Presidents & First Ladies (except the present shaming ones) there, and enjoyable respected popular music. I found the speeches enjoyable, and thought Michelle just pitch perfect

Ellen

Trollope’s Mr Scarborough’s Family (almost) Rescued!

Dorothy and her father, a lawer, a man of integrity by Alexy Pendle (last illustration in book)

Dear friends and readers, especially those who love reading Anthony Trollope, reading about him and his books, seeing the film adaptations, listening to Timothy West reading his novels aloud,

This past Monday in the bimonthly online Trollope reading group organized and maintained by the Trollope Society in London, we were to have the last talk on Mr. Scarborough’s Family by Prof. Deborah Denenholz Morse. Since I first tried reading this book more than twenty years ago, I’ve disliked it. The core male characters and their invented idlemma is repugnant, as is Mr Scarborough’s misogynistic dismissal of his wife. This time through I was trying to see it in some way that would make its center less shot through with pernicious ideas, feelings, laws and customs.

Mr John Scarborough and his younger son, Augustus: “He [Mountjoy] has denuded me of every penny” by Alexy Pendle (frontispiece)

I just couldn’t make headway. The central dominating character, Mr. John Scarborough is another of the old men in Trollope’s later novels who hates the custom of primogeniture and laws backing contracts entailing an estate on the eldest son or male in the family closely related to the present owner (e.g. the old men in The Bertrams who go out of their way to wound their heirs). Scarborough has gone to fantastic lengths in the way he marries his wife to allow him to claim he and said wife were not married at the time of his eldest son’s birth; since his eldest (and favorite) Captain Mountjoy Scarborough has turned out to be a scoundrel and reprobate (everyone says so), spends and gambles extravagantly, the father decides to claim Mountjoy is illegitimate, and the estate must go to his second son, Augustus, narrow minded, cold or priggish, often malicious, understandably jealous (said to be contemptible), whom the father understandably dislikes. He seems not to care that he defames his long dead wife (who seems to have had no will of her own), and stigmatizes his favored son. Scarborough’s thought patterns are arrogant, manipulative, misogynist; he takes pleasure in outwitting other people, does not seem to recognize his obligations to others. There is something Machiavellian about him, which Trollope adumbrated in a similar desperate aristocratic triangle, between the father, Lord Cashel, his amoral son Lord Kilcullen, and a cousin, Fanny Wyndham whom they nearly devour in an early much moe enjoyable realistic novel, The Kellys and O’Kellys, unhappily underrated.

Three groups of more secondary characters are mostly probable: two tonic, and moral people (when on stage they make the book endurable for me), the family lawyer John Grey, a man of integrity, and his unmarried loyally affectionate daughter Dorothy, who would have made a better lawyer than her father and whose counsel he listens to; a family related to the Scarboroughs through the dead wife, the Mountjoys. The father is Scarborough’s brother-in-law. Florence, the daughter (presented as beautiful, kind, virtuous), brings out better feelings in Scarborough and the eldest son, and it had been assumed Florence and the Captain would marry. She cannot but admire his magnificent self-presentation. But a complication has occurred. She has fallen in love with a good-natured, ordinarily moral young man from a clerical family, Harry Annesley, a gentleman by habit which seems yo include the idea he need not try for a money-making function in the world, but in truth is only tenuously dependent rather than entitled to a fatuous uncle’s generosity for any inheritance.

Florence denies she is impertinent to Mrs Mountjoy, her mother by Alexy Pendle (early in book)

This allows Trollope to develop a thread locking three of the groups: a fierce conflict between Florence and Mrs Sarah Mountjoy, her mother, who has had her heart set on the Captain marrying her daughter. Florence has fallen in love with the much more likable Harry. I could go on with yet more characters, e.g. the godawful needy Carrolls hangers-on to the Greys; many turns in the action (Harry does well in academia until he doesn’t) and unexpected comic character twists (the fatuous Mr Prosper if you find this sort of thing funny), but it’s the issues of illegitimacy and entailment/primogeniture that are the hot core of the book, and the character of Mr Scarborough is obviously central to that. Deborah pointed out how this kind of dilemma is central to the sensational fiction of Wilkie Collins. Trollope claimed he wrote sensational fiction too, instancing Orley Farm where the heroine forges a codicil to her husband’s will in an attempt to qualify the primogeniture rule which would have deprived her son, a late baby of the opportunity to go to university and pursue a profession.

Dorothy entering Carrolls’ house, the useless drone father by Alexy Pendle (middle of book)

Hitherto all the scholarship I had read (I admit not much and long ago — see comments) focused on Scarborough. Prof Morse reminded us P. D. Edwards had (like others) admired him as a “rogue hero,” but “lawless,” an antithesis to Trollope’s usual ideas on virtue (found in the Greys), “rendered sympathetically.” She said scholars saw in the book “a cautionary tale,” in Scarborough “romantic individualism.” Recently there are sophisticated treatments of the problems family law creates. Jenny Bourne Taylor has written a number of these on Collins — and Trollope too. Trollope is fascinated by the reality/unreality of legal fictions and their power. In the case of Cousin Henry, Henry is hiding a will which he cannot get himself to destroy, or forget about. I’d like to believe this is another autistic character we are to feel for, but most people come away despising Henry as contemptible. There are at least 8 Trollope novels beyond Orley Farm, which deal with this subject., e.g., Cousin Henry, Castle Richmond (where the wife does matter). Blackmail, weak personalities, downright crime on behalf of someone unfairly excluded from inheriting, bigamy all play a role in these different books. A revisiting of these could make aspects of them more palatable.

In Mr Scarborough’s Family Deborah’s insight is to read from a woman-centered POV, something I argued fot, more than 2 years ago now in a paper and talk, “Intriguing Women and Their friendships in Trollope” I delivered at a conference on “Trollope and women” at Somerville College, Oxford,

Deborah suggested we put Florence Mountjoy at the book’s center. Flrtence’s vision of what is morally right, what we owe to others and ourselves can be read as the book’s true core. If the book’s first chapter is on Scarborough and his obsession with what following primogeniture could do to his estate, the second chapter is on Florence, her mother’s desire that she marry Mountjoy or money and status, and her preference for Harry Annesley. From this perspective parts of the novel of the novel fall into place. Deborah was arguing this book is a feminist reproof of the inheritance laws and legal fictions undermining women. Scarborough takes his sister for granted; he looks upon women as loyal creatures somwhat better than a dog. Scarborough is revolted by intellectual women; they are unsexed. Suddenly Dorothy Grey has a linchpin structural role; she is the contrasting parallel to Florence. Cora Lansbury’s The Reasonabl Man: Trollope’s Legal Fiction takes into consideration th real qualities of individuals before judging or evaluating. Her defiance of Scarborough reminded Deborah of Cordelia’s defiance of Lear. The lawyer Grey corresponds to the loyal noble Grey in the King Lear. Florence knows what is due her like Isabel Boncassen in The Duke’s Children. Mrs Armitage, an older woman in the book, reinforces Florence’s insistence in her choice of a lifelong mate she is not to be used by others’.

And Deborah concluded that we need to really pay attention to the women in Trollope’s novels (my point in my paper), their imaginative empathy with other women. I thought of the women in the unabridgd Duke’s Children, especially the tragically thwarted Lady Mabel Grex and the dying Glencora, at the close of her life worried her daughter will also be coerced into marrying a man she does not love passionately.

As in other of her talks and papers, Deborah emphasized the erotic passion of Trollope’s heroine when she quoted a beautiful speech by Florence where Florence says she will love Harry (however diffident) with her body. She ended on defending Dorothy against James Kinkaid’s over-reading which turns Dorothy’s love of her father into something uncomfortably incestuous. I now invite my reader to read Deborah’s talk, and listen on the Trollope Society website to follow her full argument, which includes Florence’s resemblance to Isabel Boncassen (The Duke’s Children) [I will come back and link in this material when it appears.]

Dolly has made a dinner for guests, dressed up, she is taking care of other household matters, father no yet home by Alexy Pendle

For my part, I bonded in this book with Dolly Grey, another of Trollope’s favored spinsters who finds joy in companionship and liberty and following her own bent, and pleasures: a life of integrity, helping her father and others. Remember Trollope said Priscilla Stanbury is the true heroine of HKHWR; Mary Todd, is literally at the center of Trollope’s Bath in The Bertrams. Alexy Pendle’s illustrations to the Folio Society’s illustrations in Mr Scarborough’s Family, makes Dorothy a central quiet retreating pictorial presence .

I say “almost” in my title because the elephant in the room is still what most readers take to be the central core of the book, the rights of men, the patriarchy: I love Deborah’s alternative and believe this way of reading the book is valid. But the Scarborough males and their outlook, are still central to the design of the book, are not repudiated (by Mrs Mountjoy, the Carrolls, much of the worldly world) as they have enormous power, money, respect. Someone on my small list, Trollope&His Peers @groups.io conveyed her scepticism thus: “how clever it was of Trollope to distract us with Scarborough when it is Florence’s detestation of unfairness and love of the good gentleman, Harry” he wants us to dwell upon.

In the estate’s garden, Florence with Harry Annesley by Alexy Pendle (middle of book)

Ellen

Outlander: “Have we come to Journey’s End, or not?:” S8, Ep 9 & 10: “The Lighthouse,” “And the world was all around us”

Nearly last still of S8E10: Jamie (Sam Heughan) & Claire (Caitriona Balfe) laying on ground, the morning after he was shot

Dear friends, readers,

Well, we’ve had a long journey of it, whether you began by reading in 1991, the first novel, Outlander; or by watching, from 2014 to 2015, the 16 episodes of the first season, Sassenach. It’s taken 12 years, 8 seasons, and now 10 novels, not to omit 4 related Lord John novellas, assorted stories, a graphic novel, and 2 Outlandish Companions, along with 2 The Making of film companions covering the first 4 seasons … Audience expectations and eager anxiety peaked, when we were made to wait another week to reach this last pair of episodes, the hundredth and 101st (S8, E9, E10) …

So, what did you think? Did we reach Jamie and Claire’s Journey’s End, or not? Was he dead? Were they both dead, or did they quietly survive … For answers to this and other questions (the 9th episode in which there is a tragic death, centers on Lord John matters), go to Telly Visions: “By Anglophiles, for Angophiles,” the last of my five recaps for the final season.

https://www.tellyvisions.org/outlander-season-8-recap-episode-9-pharos-episode-10-and-the-world-was-all-around-us/

My argument: The filmmakers played coy with the audience.

Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Inisfree,” which Jamie quotes from twice:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings …

Ellen

Tybee Lighthouse, Savannah, Georgia

OLLI at AU: Jane Austen’s Bath & Sister Novels: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

Bath: A New History

Be of good heart! Keep hope alive!

Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) in her room at the Abbey (NA, 2007)

Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) in the autumnal landscape of Somerset (Persuasion, 1995)

A Syllabus:

Online course at:

From The Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Three Thursdays & a fourth Friday, mid-day, 11:45 am to 1:15 pm,
June 4 to June 25, on line via zoom
Building located at: 4801 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, D.C. 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of course:

We’ll visit Bath with Jane Austen and her heroines in her earliest attempted and last nearly finished novels, Northanger Abbey (drafted in 1793) and Persuasion (composed in 1816). First published posthumously in 1818 as a pair, in Northanger, we see Bath through the mind of a young naïve gothic-novel enthusiast; in Persuasion, through the mind of an apparent spinster, disillusioned, melancholy, a lover of the Romantic poety. Bath in Austen’s era was a central elite holiday spa, located picturesquely, built along the river Avon as a kind of park on a steep hill divided into walkable “druidical crescents” and housing with prominent Roman & medieval remains. It was a place for gambling, prostitution, and medical quacks alike, all there to make money off of the “visitors” or “company” (tourists, elderly and ailing people, retired people in middle or later years, wealthy people revelling in the theaters, concert and assembly rooms, shops). The goal was often pleasure; it was a place for leisure time activities of all sorts. Beyond drinking the waters, batheing, dancing, going to to concerts and plays, walkng in the hills and parks, by the rivers and canals, people came there to find a marital partner, or live in a congenial place (safe and fun for the unmarried, bachelor, spinster or widowed) not as expensive as London.

Required Texts:

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical, 2004 ISBN: 978-0-393-97850-6 I will use this one in class. Any edition will do, but if you want good introduction and notes, I recommend either the Oxford World or Penguin paperbacks.

————. Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Sacks. NY: Norton Critical, 1994. ISBN. 978-0-393-96018-8 I will use this one in class. Any edition will do, bot if you want good introduction and notes, I recommend either the Oxford World or Penguin paperbacks.

Suggested Movies:

2007 ITV (Granada in association with WBGH) Northanger Abbey, produced by James Flynn and Keith Thompson, directed by Jon Jones, written by Andrew Davies, production design David Wilson, costumes Grania Preston, starring Felicity Jones, J.J. Field, Catherine Walker, Carey Mulligan, Silvestre Le Tousel, Liam Cunningham, Desmond Barrit, William Beck, Mark Diamond, Hugh O’Conor, Julia Dearden, Gerry O’Brien. Geraldine James’s is the narrator’s voice-over. Faithful.

1995 BBC/WBGH Persuasion, produced by Fiona Finlay and George Faber, directed by Roger Michell, written by Nick Dear, costumes Alexandra Byrne, starring Amanda Root, Ciarhan Hinds, Susan Fleetword, Fiona Shaw, Sophie Thompson, Victoria Hamilton [Henrietta Musgrove]. Faithful. Dear’s playscript has been publishd as a play to be read.

Recommended recent historical novels set in Bath (there is a sort of subset of novels set in Bath) and a fictionalized dual biography of Jane and Cassandra

Colegate, Isabel. The Summer of the Royal Visit. London: Hamish Hamilon, 1991. ISBN 978-0-241-13025-5. Meditative novel takes us set in later 19th century around the time Queen Victoria visited the city, takes through the thoughts & lives of the characters a sense of Bath as a physical place, and its history from Roman times to the present. A quietly sceptical perspective.

Horney, Gill. Miss Austen: A Novel of the Austen Sisters. NY: Penguin, 2020. Excellent fictionalized dual biography of Cassandra and Jane based on family documents as well as Jane Austen’s letters (Cassandra left only 3 complete letters)

Miller, Andrew. Ingenious Pain. NY: Harcourt, 1998. A historical novel set in Bath, 18th century, dramatizes the medical worlds of Bath.

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. You should start reading Northanger Abbey at least a week before class begins. NOTE BENE: we meet three Thursdays at 11:45 and a fourth on Friday, 11:45. The class will be recorded so if anyone cannot make ny of our sessions, you can join in by watching

Jun 4: 1st week: Introduction: social history of Bath, portrait of Jane Austen; a perspective on her novels as a group. NA, Volume 1 and II, Chapters 1-4 or first half: a heroine’s eager entrance into “the world” (Bath). Catharine’s character, some lessons she is learning (false versus true friends), a country walk. I will send a copy of John Gay’s “The Hare and Many Friends.”

Jun 11: 2nd week: heyday of the gothic: Radcliffe and her Udolpho. Read the rest of NA if you have the Norton edition, there is a short excerpt from Radcliffe’s Udolpho you can read, pp 235-40; a better choice is Volume 2, Chapter 5: Emily first seeing and entering the Castle of Udolpho. Themes: real treachery; the castle (gothic building), Eleanor as gothic heroine, haunted, a vampiric villain; family politics. How to distinguish real threats, real harm from meretricious. How can we allegorize the gothic? Sine qua non: fear, isolation; our ironic happy ending.

Jun 18: 3rd week: The older and ill Austen, the romantic movement, 4 revolutions & Napoleonic world war. Persuasion Chs 1-14, or all Volume 1 and 2, Chs 1-3. A back histories of loss & pain, a disillusioned melancholy heroine; Anne in the Upper Cross world, cometh Wentworth and the Crofts, another country walk; Lyme, “by the sea, by the sea, oh how happy we’ll be;” death, grief & romantic poetry. I will send excerpts of a few poms by attachment.

Jun 26: 4th week: The rest of Persuasion Volume 2, the two cancelled chapters: Crofts take Kellynch; a heroine’s reluctant re-entry into “the world;” real friendship as companionship; real risks poverty, being crippled, war; the role of older (Lady Russell, Mrs Croft, Mrs Smith, Mrs Clay) women in Anne’s life, in this novel.Was it intended to be more comic?

Statue of Austen, outside Basingstoke Library (one of my favorite modern imagined Janes).

Supplementary Reading (recommended browse during term, if interested, read later in summer)

Borsay, Peter. The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage, and History. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2000
Claire Tomalin. Jane Austen. A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997
Davis, Graham and Penny Bonsall. Bath: A New History. UK: Keele University Press, 1996.
Fergusson, Adam. The Sack of Bath: a record and an indictment. London: Compton Russell, 1963.
Ison, Walter. Georgian Buildings of Bath. Bath: Kingsmead Press, 1980 (revised edition)
Little, Bryan. The Building of Bath: 47-1947. London: Collins, 1947.
————-. Portrait of Somerset. London: Hale, 1969.
Moody, Ellen A Jane Austen Miscellany. Published papers, reviews, blog-essays.
http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/misc.html
Neale, R. S. Bath: A Social History, 1680-1850, or A Valley of Pleasure, yet a Sink of Iniquity. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Stride, Louie. Memoirs of a Street Urchin. UK: Bath University Press, 1980.
Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen, A Life. NY: Vintage, 1999
Todd, Janet. Living with Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridfe UP, 2025
———–. Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. 2nd Edition. Cambridge, 2015
Thompson, E. P. “Patrician Society, Plebian Culture,” Journal of Social History, 7 (1974): 382-405.
————–. “Eighteenth-Century English society: class struggle without class?”, Social History 2:3 (1978): 133-65.
Vachell, Horace Annesley. Golden House: A Romance of Bath. London: Cassell, 1937.
Worseley, Lucy. Jane Austen at Home: A Biography. London St Martin’s Press, 2017
Romney, Rebecca. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf. A Rare Book Collector’s Quest. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2025

Outlander: “There is nothing lost, but may be found, if sought:” S8, E7 & 8: “Evidence of Things Not Seen” & “In the Forest

Fergus (Cesar Domboy) and Marsali Fraser (Lauren Lyle)

As the titles of #Outlander Episodes 5 & 6 imply, we return to the deepest impulses of historical romance history: the retrieving of the long dead and the past; and the deep idealism and melancholy of its pastoral places (Et in Arcadia Ego, I [death], too, am in Arcadia. Their spiritual pilgrimage to a home for all is coming to an end
@anneelliot.bsky.social [my user name & address on Blusky] dives in:

https://www.tellyvisions.org/outlander-season-8-episode-7-recap-evidence-of-things-not-seen-episode-8-recap-in-the-forest/

My argument: Episode 7’s theme: “Of Lost” and “now found” things (recalling S3, E4, over 20 years since. Episode 8’s theme: “Loss and Reconcilation through the ghostly magic and the spring renewal which nature’s hope (“springs eterna”?) provides

Appropriately, this 8th season of revenants, angry and hurt, segues us back to Season 1, Episode 1’s phantom. For example, Master Raymonde turns from a lone silent apparition revealing himself to Claire, to a talkative man, explaining all to the seamstress is rather like Jamie in S1 E1 standing below Claire and Frank Randall’s bedroom in the Edinburgh rain gazing up at Claire through the window, unnerving Frank.

“‘Darling? What’s the matter? Frank.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I’m not at all sure that I haven’t. When he pushed past me, he was close enough that I should
have felt him brush my sleeve as he passed, but I didn’t. And then I turned around to say
something, – and he’d gone. [Snaps] He just vanished. That’s when I felt a chill down my spine.'”
Online transcript, “Sassenach” by Ronald D. Moore

Frank in dark rain glimpses Jamie’s ghost from the back as through the window Jamie watches Claire getting into bed

Again I am so chuffed to be a staff writer on Telly Visions; this return to l’écriture-femme, mothers, sisters, aunts, daughter and fathers, sons son-in-laws and nephews, its circular, recurrence structures provides roots, a site to return to for the needed memories of individuals in our era to connect with.

Jane Pocoke (Silvia Presente), granddaughter to Jamie (to her right), Lord John Grey (David Berry) anh his adopted son, William (Charles Vandervaart)

Gabaldon has done considerable research on the less famous mid-atlantic and southern battles of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary battles, which were turning points in the Massachusetts and New York colonies and North Carolina and Virginia campaigns. I should have said this before.

Telly Visions By Anglophiles for Anglophiles
Ellen

Outlander: The Eighth Season: Episodes 5 (Send for the Devil”) and 6 (“Blessed are the Merciful”)

Brianna (Sophie Skeleton) painting Amaranthus

As the titles of #Outlander Episodes 5 & 6 imply, the overarching story is a war narrative. What’s different this time (between these two episodes and all that came before) is that the male-initiated story takes over the plot design and secondary story lines.
@anneelliot.bsky.social [my user name & address on Blusky] dives in:

https://www.tellyvisions.org/outlander-season-8-recap-episode-5-send-for-the-devil-episode-6-blessed-are-the-merciful/

My argument: Outlander undermines its origins as a heroine’s text

I am so chuffed to be a staff writer on Telly Visions; I find this depiction of the 18th century in a time-travelling tale philosophically, existentially apt for our troubled era

Claire enables Mrs Whitaker to givebirth to twins, one of which is in a breech position.

Telly Visions By Anglophiles for Anglophiles
Ellen

Outlander: The Eighth Season: S8Ep3 (“Abies Fraseri”) and S8Ep2 (“Muskets, Liberty, and Sauerkraut”)

So, as promised, a series of recap-essays Outlander’s eighth season (click here for Skye Song).

Jamie takes his granddaughter to see the cairns in the graveyard at Lallybroch

Go over to Telly Visions and read it there

This time I asked why time-traveling historical romance is so popular just now, and how in Outlander, these penetrations into the unknown, blend with ancient Scots mythic stories, pilgrim figures, and numinous relics (see Valerie Etelle Frankel, The Symbolism and Sources of Outlander: The Scottish Fairies, Folklore, Magic and Meaning in the TV series and books). Jamie’s gaelic prayer in 8:4 is central to this episode and the series itself: The prayer is to or from St Columba of Iona (the Hebrides), an Irish wandering saint who made pilgrimage a central aspect of a spiritual or ethically meaningful life doing good in the name of Christ, a self-imposed exile to create a new restored life with others, from which they might wander again. It’s said this archetypal myth has become a post-modern form of personhood, and ties to others though love, time, and work …

You’ll hear this lyric and haunting music

“I am a woman of Balnain.
The folk have stolen me over again, the stones seemed to say.
I stood upon the hill, and the wind did rise
And the sound of thunder rolled across the land.
I placed my hands upon the tallest stone
And traveled to a far, distant land where I lived for a time
Among strangers who became lovers and friends.
But one day, I saw the moon come out, and the wind rose once more
So I touched the stones and traveled back to my own land
And took up again with the man I had left behind.”

Ellen

The new Forsyte Saga is coming soon; there is a 25% discount

So, good news: It’s been 22 years since ‘The Forsytes’ were on PBS, we’re celebrating its March 22 return with 22% off through Easter Monday! Sign up NOW to get 22% off your first three months!

https://www.tellyvisions.org/the-forsytes-debut-special-3-months

Claire helps an enormously pregnant free black woman, Mrs Whitaker, give birth to twins