Read by Simon Vance ( )

Anthony Trollop is a master at creating memorable characters. It has been months since I read the book but I can still remember the Dales and their associates vividly. What a fascinating relationship between Mr Dale and his sister-in-law, Mrs Mary Dale, both of them forming a grudging respect for each other. Other than Mr. Dale and John Crofts whom Isabella Dale married, there is nothing much to like about the men in the book. Adolphus Crosbie, John Eames and to a certain extent, Bernard Dale behave like cads. How delightful it is when Crosbie got his just desserts! ( )

Simon Vance does a marvelous job narrating this 5th entry in Trollope's Barsetshire series. Unfortunately, this novel is less amusing - more of a straightforward romance, with sickly sweet Lily Dale as the heroine.

2019 reread via LibriVox recording:
I still don't like Lily Dale! ( )

Classic Barchester. I would agree with some other reviewers that by the end you do get exasperated with Lily. Unusually for Trollope he does not resolve all the plot lines by the end of the book. The minor ones are nicely tidied up but poor John and Lily are left rather in limbo. So I have started The Last Chronicle in the hope that Lily had finally seen sense. ( )

Speeding through Trollope is never wise: all of his books are long, drawn-out performances, where the various threads he weaves throughout eventually come together in the end—the characters of different social stations and statuses; the bickering families, neighbors, and parish members; and also the young men and women (typically, the latter) who defy gender norms and conventions, but who, by the novels’ ends, adhere to a Victorian readership’s expectations and satisfy their sense of closure, of right made wrong, of good triumphing over evil.

But this is to overlook Trollope’s greatest strength as a novelist: he never condemns those who have transgressed against social norms; he doesn’t join the neighbors who gossip, spread rumor, and cast stones. In each of Trollope’s characters—both the worthy and the unworthy—we see facets of human nature, and, in turn, we see shimmer of ourselves, to be examined and never judged. In short, Trollope recognizes that all of us are as capable of evil as well as of good, and he explores the thin line that divides what society and culture would view as extremes, and which he views as humanity merely toeing the line.

As the fifth book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, The Small House at Allington casts a much smaller net than its predecessors, and, from what I recall, from the finale that follows. Whereas The Warden began the series on a somewhat tentative note, almost unsure of itself or where it stood (standalone book or part of a series?), Trollope’s ventures from Barchester Towers—the most widely-read of Trollope’s novels, perhaps, and not a good indication of his scope, as I wrote in my linked review—to Doctor Thorne, and from Framley Parsonage (perhaps the most successful thus far of the series; see my review there) to this title show a steady progress toward the world-building of the fictional Barsetshire: to be sure, the reader who tackles these books in order will be a much happier reader for the dipping in and out of myriad characters from previous volumes, many of whose backstories Trollope takes for granted that one knows.

While the second through the fourth books highlight how skilled Trollope is at assembling a wide range of characters and having plots, subplots, and even sub-subplots abound, all of which intersect around a certain character or a problem (usually money or marriage), The Small House at Allington is much smaller in scope, dealing almost solely with the same group of characters before, during, and after the young, beautiful, but immensely annoying Lily Dale is jilted by Adolphous Crosbie for a woman of rank and, so he thinks, money: the Lady Alexandrina de Courcy. In her introduction to the lovely new Oxford editions of the series, Dinah Birch notes that this was the most popular of the Barsetshire books for Victorian readers (it was even viewed by Trollope as such: “I do not think that I have ever done better work,” he wrote in An Autobiography), but she does note that today the novel “divides its readers, and the character of Lily Dale has always been the central point of contention.”

Allington's world is a much bleaker world than we see in the other Barsetshire novels: characters don’t change much here; they don’t learn much in their toils or troubles; they don’t succeed, triumph, or mature in ways that readers of Trollope expect from his always psychologically-astute characters. And, in some ways, that is this book’s strength: it categorically refuses to give readers what they expect from a novel, what they have grown accustomed to expect from a certain author, and, as such, Trollope can take liberties that he has not before. While Lily Dale’s jilting is the central concern around which numerous characters revolve, some of the more interesting characters get a bit more room in the spotlight, largely because they at least set plot points in motion or slowly begin to develop and mature: the “hobbledehoy” John Eames, who is trying to make his way in the London world of business and busyness, longing all the while for his childhood sweetheart, Lily Dale; Crosbie, who has won Lily’s heart but who has his own selfish desire for power and wealth in mind when he jilts her; Mrs. Dale, who is a fascinating study of motherhood and female power (as well as restraint) in dealing with widowhood, bringing up two daughters alone, and being forced to live off the “generosity” of her dead husband’s family; Mrs. Roper, who runs a boarding house in London with some questionable tenants (one of whom is her own daughter); and earls, squires, ladies, and lords galore. Unlike the previous books in the series, though, Trollope fails here to fully unite these refracted characters’ experiences; and, as a result, the novel does not read as well thought-out or as well-plotted as his others. Indeed, there are even three or four chapters on Plantagenet Palliser’s dangerous liaison with Lady Griselda Dumbello (whom one will recall from earlier Barsetshire novels) which seem to add nothing to the main plot here at all; Trollope was working on the Palliser series’ first book, Can You Forgive Her?, as he was writing Allington, and appears to have got some of his signals crossed.

I do still strongly recommend that those new to Trollope begin with his lesser-known, but wonderfully executed, The Claverings (you can read my review there).

Still… yet still… ah, still, still… There is nothing quite like spending a month immersed in a 600-or-more page Trollope. It is very much like a holiday, getting acquainted and reacquainted with characters; getting close to them, seeing them flaws and all and being almost as nonjudgmental as the narrator/author is about their deeds and misdeeds. It opens one’s eyes to human nature in microcosm, and forces one to see things in oneself that one might prefer to keep buried or cloaked in shadow. Allington is very much the bridge to the finale of the series, and I look forward to revisiting that before the year’s end, before I take my leave of Barsetshire for the world of the Pallisers. ( )