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A review by pgchuis
Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope
4.0
Lady Clara Desmond (aged 16) falls for Owen Fitzgerald, a man to whom her widowed mother is also attracted. The match is forbidden as Owen is felt not to be sufficiently wealthy/grand for her. Owen takes this badly and leads a "wild" bachelor life. Clara gets to know his cousin Herbert and becomes engaged to him, but then Herbert loses everything and Clara's mother thinks again of Owen for her.
In places this is pretty depressing (blackmail, the Irish potato famine and so on), but thankfully the blackmail plot is thwarted before too long. I would be interested to know what is thought more generally about Trollope's various comments on the famine; its causes and the efforts made to keep the people alive. Clara's mother was an excellent baddie, as were the Molletts. I kept looking out for matches for Emmeline and Mary, but these never came. At one point I feared that Clara would keep switching between the two men who loved her, but I thought Trollope's description of the decision she made was convincing. Owen was a rather melodramatic character, in whom I did not really believe.
The final plot twists were also rather melodramatic, but satisfying.
In places this is pretty depressing (blackmail, the Irish potato famine and so on), but thankfully the blackmail plot is thwarted before too long. I would be interested to know what is thought more generally about Trollope's various comments on the famine; its causes and the efforts made to keep the people alive. Clara's mother was an excellent baddie, as were the Molletts. I kept looking out for matches for Emmeline and Mary, but these never came. At one point I feared that Clara would keep switching between the two men who loved her, but I thought Trollope's description of the decision she made was convincing. Owen was a rather melodramatic character, in whom I did not really believe.
The final plot twists were also rather melodramatic, but satisfying.