Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington: A Review

A great writer is somebody who can take a completely ordinary, unremarkable character and make her memorable. Anthony Trollope is just such a writer. I recently finished his novel The Small House at Allington and I can say that it made me realize that there is a lot more to Trollope than I ever knew.

Lily Dale, the novel’s female protagonist, is a vapid, boring creature with nothing that can be even remotely interesting about her. She tries to fill the void she has in place of a personality by adopting the persona of what “the perfect woman” is supposed to be like according to the trashy novels she reads. She convinces herself that she is in love with the first passerby and starts persecuting him with her exalted monologues of how she will serve his every whim and lay her life at his feet.

Understandably, the poor guy soon runs away.

This makes Lily very happy since she can now play the role of a victim and lord it over people around her. She becomes the perfect family tyrant who generates the feelings of intense guilt in family members (for the most part, her weak and miserable mother) and exploit those feelings to feel good about herself.

Mind you, this is not the reading of the novel that you will find anywhere. In every review of the book that I have read, Lily Dale is the embodiment of true unwavering love instead of a hysterical, mean-spirited damsel with no substance to her whatsoever. That’s the beauty of good literature: it speaks differently to each of us.