Returning to Trollope (among other authors, reading/writing/teaching topics)

Trollope’s Lady Anna (from a cover for facsimile print-out)

Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding playing his violin in the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles)

“It is useless to suppose that social distinctions have vanished” — Virginia Woolf, “The niece of an Earl,” from The Common Reader; a propos of Lady Anna, I quoted this as epigraph to my chapter on Lady Anna in my book

Dear friends and readers,

Let this blog signal that I am on the road to recovery. About two weeks ago I began to re-immerse myself in Barsetshire, preparatory for a class I hope to teach next fall (Making Barsetshire). I started rereading Hennedy’s Unity in Barsetshire, a wonderful — perceptive, well-written — old-fashioned close reading literary study I can’t recommend too highly. I began with the novels at the same time with my favorite Dr Thorne (“assigned for my online NYC and Beyond online reading book club)

Tom Hollander as Dr Thorne in the 2015 ITV Dr Thorne

St
Stefani Martini as Mary Thorne

— and watched Alan Plater’s Barchester Chronicles, which captures the complicated comic and grave tones of the books. How glad I am I discovered Trollope sites and friends on the Internet in the 1990s. These changed and enriched my life. I had promised to do a talk on Lady Anna for the online Trollope reading group I’ve attended faithfully when the pandemic began (March-April 2020) and told myself I didn’t need a typed copy to do it.

I also told myself typed lectures were not required to teach again and that a way to begin again without exhausting or straining myself was to repeat some favorite courses. I would finish the women’s detective novels course I had begun and return to Trollope’s first major successes, the Barchester books.

So I began rereading Lady Anna (about which I wrote one of my chapters in my book, Trollope on the Net). It was hard to do: I kept rereading passages I didn’t realize I had read; I had to outline the book as I went to get a picture of it in my mind). I found I could not write at the same level by hand; I had to type — arduous and slow process as my fingers wanted to touch type, but couldn’t. The left fingers were especially beyond conscious control. But with the help of my book, and memory, I achieved another version of “The lady ought to marry the tailor!”

I delivered that talk today to the online Trollope Society Reading group, although this computer was not attached to the internet. Laura was here, and attached the new laptop she had made into a semi-clone of this (she had moved onto it all but the movies & website materials) found here to the three screen set-up for herself to work for WETA from, and I sat down at it. She got it to work (including sound from zoom), and all went splendidly. The kind people welcomed me back. I have now put the paper on academia.edu, and the chairman of the society has now put the video of my talk on the London Trollope Society. I link it in here from YouTube as I have done my previous talks:

And here it is with the text beautifully laid out on the Trollope Society website:

Lady Anna – Chapters 25-36

My paper-talk outlines in succinct manner the core themes, characters, and suggests the nature of the art of the book by focusing on the key penultimate installment of the novel. Here it is linked completely in:

Lady Anna: “The lady ought to marry the tailor!”

My syllabus for the fall for an online course I’ll call Making Barsetshire was also approved today

This will be a course on the origination and development of Anthony Trollope’s first cycle of novels, published between 1855 and 1866 (six in all). Barsetshire was not a planned series but evolved over time to become one. We’ll read the first three, The Warden, Barchester Towers, and Dr. Thorne. By 1857, Trollope came to see they were one imaginary-realistic county with its peculiar mix of themes, places, and recurring characters. The class will be asked to view outside of class, two marvelous film adaptations, Barchester Chronicles (1982, BBC) and Dr. Thorne (2015, ITV). We’ll explore how these relate to mid-century Victorian England and modern TV serials, our own era today, and Trollope himself

And now I’ll return to Hennedy’s book, Unity in Barsetshire before subsiding delightfully into another episode of the fourth season of All Creatures Great and Small, my next topic here (the books & the three iterations on film).

One of Constable’s depictions of the cathedral in whose “purlieus” Trollope said the idea for The Warden came to him

Ellen