Trollope on Jane Austen:

“Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, — what we generally mean when we speak of romance — she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; — and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop.”

Trollope’s Framley Parsonage reminds me of Jane Austen–or maybe a combination of Jane Austen Pride and Prejudiceand Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, with a decidedly clerical atmosphere. The main characters are parsons and deans and bishops —and their wives and daughters —but the concerns of these ecclesiastical persons are the same concerns that Jane Austen’s characters have: Who is going to marry whom? And how rich is the bride and/or the groom?

Lady X is concerned that her son and heir marry a lady of property and education. Lady Y is worried that, since she is not very pretty nor very young, her many suitors have only one goal: to get their hands on her money. Lady G can’t decide whether to encourage her daughter to marry Lord X or Lord Y.

However, it all turns out well in the end, and some of Trollope’s scenes would “move laughter” in a Baptist preacher. I think some Jane Austen fans who have read all of the Austen canon and are in need of a fix would do well to try Trollope’s Barsetshire novels.