Not one of Trollope's best. His books are really good when they pit the marriage plot against some other element of institutional structure: the Church (Barsetshire), Parliament (Palliser), Finance (The Way We Live Now), fox hunting (all of them, really, but especially The American Senator). Even the execrable Dr Whortle's School was pitting a couple of marriage-plot type things against each other, with a backdrop of private education as an institution. 

But this book had none of that. It was just the marriage plot, and an awfully boring marriage plot at that. Our young heroine, Clara Amedroz, must choose between the Good Lover, Will Belton, who is bluff and hearty and impatient in his love and dreadfully dull; and the much more interesting Bad Lover, Captain Aylmer, who is an MP (of course) of aristocratic family. He's not a bad lover because he's a rake, but rather because he is not capable of being sincere and genuine in his love. He shows different faces to different parts of the world, depending on the role he's playing: a dutiful nephew to a mutual aunt he shares with Clara; a dutiful son to his overbearing mother; a politician to his constituents, a man of the world in London. Our heroine is a much more interesting person at the beginning of the book, when she's talking to him. She makes trenchant remarks about how women are seen as hypocrites if they adapt their behaviour to different situations, whereas for men it's accepted. This, of course, is how we know that Aylmer is a bad lover; because he's benefiting from the ability to do exactly what Trollope is telling us (through Clara's voice) is bad no matter who does it.  But the fact that he and Clara can have these conversations means that they make the book so worth reading, unlike when Clara's talking to Will Belton. Then she descends back into Trollope's ubiquitous role for young women: 'oh, I'm much too virtuous to say exactly what I want, and must demure and pretend I'm not in love!' I swear, Trollope is so much better at character development when he's not trying to shove virtuous young women into the right person's arms.

I want justice for Aylmer! There's so much scope for character work with him. He has genuine conversations about things other than tedious love-talk with our heroine, and although he is fully under the thumb of his overbearing mother, he is still governed by a genuine sense of honor and desire to do the right thing that is all his own. Wouldn't it be interesting to see him meet a heroine who, rather than deploring the accepted hypocrisy of men, is instead able to help him harness it, and indeed harness it in herself? The largest reason things break down between Clara and Aylmer is because Clara cannot subjugate herself to Aylmer's mother. But a true match for Aylmer would know how to present a subjugated face to Aylmer's mother, while in fact doing exactly as she likes when not in her presence. This book would have been so, so much better if Clara and Belton's true, sincere, unchanging personalities were set as foils against the hypocritical, changeable, ever-shifting personalities that Aylmer and his own eventual bride offer, as an alternative way to interact with the world.

There was certainly room enough to do it. As it was, the thin, unsatisfying plot was tiresome and repetitive, with nothing to offset the tedious virtue-focused marriage plot that is always the boringest part of every Trollope novel. If that had been trimmed, and an Aylmer foil-plot built in, this book would have been terrific. As it was, ugh.