5/18/2023 0 Comments The fixed period trollope![]() ![]() The stiff, priggish Plantagenet Palliser who appears in Can You Forgive Her? is an older, wiser and more flexible man, albeit still highly principled, in The Duke’s Children. More, they are allowed to grow and develop over the course of a novel, or in the case of the series, over a number of novels. But it is always done with a sympathetic understanding. Even those for whom Trollope felt the greatest affinity, perhaps them more than the others, have their all too human failings exposed. The characters are all recognisably human and rarely descend to caricature. Which is why Trollope, with his minutely observed characters, who lived perpetually in the author’s mind, wrote such great, memorable novels. Without good characters, I don’t think you can have a truly great book. And it is characters who live on after you finish reading a book. It is characters that make a book come to life, make it breathe. I can still quote great chunks of it if called upon and its characters leapt vividly back to life in my mind when I saw the article linked below. I remember studying it for my O-level (remember those anyone?) in English Literature. I find it hard to believe that it is 60 years since William Golding’s Lord of The Flies was first published. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |