10 Books that influenced me most in my life? Anthony Trollope’s Dr Thorne

Tom Hollander as Dr Thorne (scripted by Jerome Fellowes, Hollander is right for the part)

Friends and readers,

About four days ago I joined in on a meme on face-book: you are asked to cite 10 books that influenced you strongly or made a real impact on you or your life, one a day for 10 days, with the book cover or illustration if there is one. I’ve cited three thus far: Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and Suzanne Therault’s Un cenacle humanist de la Renaissance autour Vittoria Colonna, chatelaine d’Ischia. Day 10/4: Anthony Trollope’s Dr Thorne. I was somewhere between 18 and 20 and read it in a college class. In this case I can share the original cover, but I have a bit of a qualification:

While I just didn’t forget this novel, wanted to write my term paper on Trollope (but the professor didn’t approve because he thought Trollope not quite first-rate, he was just a mirror of his age, his fiction “told” instead of “showing” so I wrote on Dickens), and remembered ever after the amused calm in the narrator’s voice as he patiently explained he was forced to take two long chapters at the opening because he had to tell us the previous history of the characters and place before his book could officially begin; while I didn’t forget it, I didn’t go on to read more Trollope for 11 years and then it was the Pallisers in black-and-white on an old TV that set me off, and I just loved Can You Forgive You? this rich extraordinary world teaming with all sorts of life, but I had to stop (I read all six Pallisers in a row in tandem with Jim, my husband) as I was teaching and doing a dissertation on Richardson’s Clarissa. So it was the third start that mattered finally: age 43, my father came to the hospital where I had ended up after a bad car accident and gave me a copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton (the Dover edition) and said Trollope would get me through (it was Metropolitan hospital in Upper Manhattan in NYC where the place was so underfunded there was but one person to do X-rays in the whole place): “how wise Trollope is,” said my father.

I still have a copy of that first (for me) CYFH? and in spring 2019 I shall start teaching all six Pallisers in a row at two OLLIs (American University and George Mason University). Next spring at both OLLIs I shall begin a six term journey with the people there on the Pallisers, one a term, beginning with CYFH?.

We just finished watching all 26 episodes of the Pallisers one each week on TrollopeandHisContemporaries@groups.io. Raven makes Lady Glenn the quietly tragic heroine of the series:

Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora McClusky in a symbolic bethrothal in the first episode of the 26 Pallisers

I’ve written some 30 blogs on the Pallisers, and published a paper on its intertextuality and that of Barchester Chronicles, with other Victorian film adaptations. I hope to write yet another blog, this one a single comprehensive concise one on the series as a whole before I go off on holiday this summer.

I still have the copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton that my father gave me too, with me today, this morning. Here’s its cover ….

Need I cite my book, Trollope on the Net, five published papers, two of them on the film adaptations (by Andrew Davies of The Way We Live Now and He Knew He Was Right), two reviews, a huge part of this website, years of running reading groups on the Net, participation in the face-book Trollope society page, the New York Society itself, giving paper there, giving papers at two Trollope conferences, and now teaching several classes on Barsetshire novels, Beyond Barsetshire, the short stories.

Anthony Trollope as traveler by Julia Margaret Cameron, albumen print, 1864

Could there be more impact?

Ellen