![]() ![]() ![]() Her compulsive mendacity when wedded to her virtues–beauty and cleverness–and to her vices–a penchant for scheming and acquisitiveness, an ignorance of the business world, poor character judgment, and a talent for artifice, makes her a danger, in the end and most of all to herself. (Actually, one of the other characters labels her a “vixen.” Why is it that the female of the species has been so consistently maligned?)Īmong other things, The Eustace Diamonds is about the ubiquity of lying, and Lizzie Greystock, the protagonist, wins the laurels. ![]() Like Thackeray, Trollope chooses a bitch as his protagonist. ![]() Like Collins’ novel, diamonds go missing, and much authorial effort is expended navigating their disappearance and whereabouts. In some respects, The Eustace Diamonds is a fusion of Vanity Fair and The Moonstone. All I can say is that maybe there’s hope for Moby Dick, another classic with which I’ve endured some false starts. I can’t say it was an altogether pleasant experience, but it was never an unilluminating one. This time I made my way through a considerably bulky exemplar, nearly 600 pages of the dense prose of The Eustace Diamonds, to the literal bitter end for Trollope’s protagonist. I’ve started Trollope novels a few times over the years, but never got past a few chapters. With regard to the pantheon of great Victorian writers, I’ve adored Dickens, Thackeray, Collins, and, most of all, Eliot, but I’ve never been able to plow through a Trollope novel. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |