An Old Man’s Love by Anthony Trollope

Description

In his Hampshire country seat Mr William Whittlestaff breakfasts punctually, reads his letters, and has arranged his widowed life into a comfortable ritual. Into it comes Mary Lawrie, a young woman left without fortune or family, whom he first shelters, then quietly proposes to in a spirit of duty and kindness that ripens, almost against his will, into something deeper and more painful than he expected.

The book’s drama arrives with John Gordon, Mary’s younger lover returned, and from then on Trollope holds a murderously modest scene up to the light: three decent people each owed something and each owing something. The old man’s love is tested not by villainy but by goodness, which is Trollope’s subtlest compassion. Written as his powers were completing themselves, the novel ends in a sacrifice that neither of the young people quite understands and that the reader is invited to measure slowly.

Why readers value this late Trollope

• His proven sympathy for the middle-aged and the unglamorous.
• A triangular moral situation resolved without a villain.
• One of the most quietly truthful late-Victorian treatments of an age-gap romance.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The full 24 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.