Anna Bouverie (Lindsay Duncan) waiting for Flora, her daughter’s school bus to arrive
Rev Peter Bouverie (Jonathan Coy) waiting to be called in to be told whether he’s to be promoted or not
“the suffering spirit cannot descend from its dignity of reticence. It has a nobility of its own, made sacred by many tears, by the flowing of streams of blood from unseen wounds, which cannot descend from its dais to receive pity and kindness” (Trollope of Mrs Crawley, in Last Chronicle of Barset, “Lady Lufton’s Proposition,” Ch 50)
Dear friends and readers,
I was first riveted by this tale, Joanna Trollope’s first strong success (in every way) when, as I read, I realized she was re-creating two of her renowned ancestor’s most powerful characters, the Rev Josiah Crawley and his wife, Mrs Mary Crawley. Joanna recreates a closely analogous pair of troubled lives in the story of the highly intelligent and well-meaning but underpaid, mildly disrespected, and therefore deeply humiliated, proud, inwardly raging the Rev Peter Bouverie, and his (up to this point) selfless, compliant, overworked and not paid at all wife, an equally intelligent talented and loving wife, Anna Bouverie. Change the vowel sounds and you have Emma Bovary. The allusions underline the idea this kind of story — the wife seeking independence is bored and what she needs is titillating erotic romance and seduction is misogynistic. What Anna craves is liberty, time and energy to be and find herself. My latest re-reading of The Last Chronicle of Barset left me with a newly aroused-to-anger and hurt-for Mrs Crawley. To me she was the disregarded tragic figure (all the worse since she bought into her obedient enslavement to a will and decisions against her own) and I thought to myself, this is how Joanna Trollope saw Anthony Trollope’s frequently silenced, half-starved wife.
Joanna Trollope has given some very disingenuous interviews where she says when she began to write, Anthony Trollope (she found) meant nothing to her (Trollope, Joanna, and David Finkle. “Joanna Trollope: Family Plots with Untidy Endings.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 186, Gale, 2004. Gale Literature Resource Center). The plot of her first novel, published with a pseudonym, Caroline Harvey, Parson’s Harding’s Daughter, and other of her early historical romance pastiche novels (using the same pseudonym), the literal happenings are very different from anything her ancestor wrote (Joanna’s colonialist, taking place in India); but names, character situations, motifs are taken from Anthony Trollope’s Barcestershire. In this one of her break-away from Harvey books we meet a Miss Dunstable, are in the familiar clerical world with caste and money problems. I have to wonder what is gained by such denials.
To me much is lost. By reading the book as a re-write ( or post-text or sequel), Anna’s quest not just to be independent, but to stop being defined and controlled in her behavior by a category (the rector’s wife), or (generalizing out) one of many women supporting a male institution with work & a life no male would do or live — makes more sense. Joanna is objecting to the patriarchy. In the most searing and startling moments in the emotionally effective TV series (written by Hugh Whitemore, directed by Giles Forster), Anna is told she is not seeking individual liberty, to find herself, to carve out space for her to achieve some time for an identity apart from Rector’s wife & a mother). If she wanted that she would take a job more commensurate with her abilities — as she does at the end of the book & TV series when she becomes a German & French teacher in the private Catholic school that has taken her daughter in.
No, she chooses to be a clerk in a supermarket to reveal to the world that the church establishment is refusing to pay her husband adequately, exploiting and preying on his silenced loyal family. Her closest friendship is with a woman deacon, Isobel Thomson (Gabrielle Lloyd) who confronts her with disloyalty to the church and God. Joanna’s book is a commentary on Anthony’s books & characters as her Sense and Sensibility is a commentary on Austen’s novel. It is a seriously intended depiction of people who take religious faith and their church seriously — if talking to God, discussing and acting for the church’s interests, trying to identify these are not just filler – and they are not.
Anna pushes back hard against the Deacon Isobel Thomson
It is also until near the end a defense of Trollope’s much distressed and half-maddened Josiah. We study or follow Peter becoming more and more rigid, more destructive of his own marriage, as he demands his own way and obedience to his will. He requires that Anna quit the job, refuses to because there is nothing to discuss. He enlists sycophantic women to show Anna up. Finally he takes the extraordinary step of quitting for her. He offends the people who work in the supermarket by implying the work his wife does is demeaning,somehow disgraceful distasteful work. Still as acted by Jonathan Coy he is suffering so strongly, aching with hurt and disappointment. (A major theme for Joanna Trollope.) We feel for him when he realizes he need not write a sermon this week for this is now the new Archdeacon’s job.
Anna with Jonathan (Stephan Dillane) on a bench near the Archdeacon’s home
I say until near the end, for in the close both book & movie go off the rails of a proto-feminist Trollopian fable: after all Anna falls into an adulterous love affair with the new archdeacon’s younger brother, a sexy idle university student (or lecturer), Jonathan (Stephan Dillane looking like a rock star from the 1970s), grief over which drives Peter to a half-suicide. Anna goes along with the church ceremonies but these over, professes herself so quickly (& to the archdeacon too) much relieved; it’s easier to be fonder of Peter now! She now assume her attitude, the choice of boyfriend will have little effect on her relationship with her children or their memories of their father. The last scene but one of book and movie has her sitting on her husband’s grave telling him it has all been for the best, and if he doesn’t think so he needs to be in paradise longer. The last phrase precludes the idea she is getting back at him for taking it upon himself to hand in her resignation. But there is a disconcerting lack of remorse.
Eleanor confiding in Anna during a visit, after a dinner party
Later that morning, Anne back home, waiting (again) for the bus, thinking
She now becomes a kind of guru or model to emulate for her friend, Eleanor Ramsey (Pam Ferris), a successful but bitter novelist who leaves her much berated despised husband. Brutish insensitivity characterizes other characters early on (her female rivals, her friend’s bullying ways); a kind of hard shell forms around the by this time over-serene Anna. As with her novel on adoption, Next of Kin, I felt embarrassed by the seeming unself-conciousness lack of shame with which her characters talk so explicitly and casually about their hitherto unthinkable hurtful behavior. People may think these things, but don’t often say them. I felt a oblivious selfishness and complacency in Anna’s behavior. How else escape? I don’t know. I agree that Peter would not talk to her or respond to her overtures. I liked Anna thrusting a glass of water over Peter’s head when he continues to refuse to talk, to compromise, but can feel why so many critics and thinking readers are made uneasy by events in her novels.
Joanna Trollope has a Don Juan character, Patrick O’Sullivan (Miles Anderson) who mistakes her for an Emma Bovary and Anna lashes out more than once at him (as he does not give up easily) as arrogant and indifferently playing with her and other women. Trollope’s is a apt concise analysis of the cold egoism of the traditional rake. But her Anna is disconcerting too as she slipped very quickly into finding a lover in Jonathan. Peter is now dismissed facilely by all as having been sick — the community is let off the hook. Trollope registers her awareness that she has undermined her own book by having a comically cheerful singing rector and inflexibly bounce-y new Rector’s Wife take over after the funeral.
All this said, there is another aspect to this novel and the film adaptation that makes me want to read and see more of Joanna Trollope. The woman at the center of this novel and the film, as so beautifully enacted by Lindsay Duncan, embodied a reality and feel for a woman’s life with an unconscious self-enriched on-goingness I loved entering into. She is essentially good-natured, loving (which is why she has become the go-to person for everything in the parish and her home). The character does not look down on, is amused by what is different from her even when she sees it is someone living from a limited point of view or absurd behaviors (like the way she must stack cans on a shelf). In the film Duncan adds a sense of comfortableness in nature, with the things of society. She is so beautiful too. I wanted to re-watch her the way I do Caitronia Balfe (in Outlander) and re-read scenes.
Joanna Trollope’s aim to give her female reader a character and experience to revel in vicariously is expressed reflexively in the character of Marjorie Richardson (played pitch perfectly by Prunella Scales), wife of a Major who has spent with him much time “in the colonies.” Marjorie is seen by Anna as a snob, as critical of Anna, and superficially condescending from what Marjorie says and does — taken aback by finding Anna working as a clerk in a supermarket (!), saying aloud how glad she is that Peter doesn’t mind not being promoted (of course he will say that). But I noticed how the camera continually captures her standing behind Anna in church, near her here and there. After Peter’s death, she has her husband offer Anna a cottage to live in for free — a puzzling offer since it’s deep in the country, away from the town where the children go to school and lively social life goes on. Anna does not have a car after Peter totals his. This is never satisfactorily explained since when Anna comes to say no, Marjorie only says she wouldn’t want it either.
Marjorie (Prunella Scales) opening up to tell of her life
Again, after now renting her own flat — for herself and children
It functions as an excuse to provide Marjorie with an opportunity to open up to Anna for the first time. Anna learns that Marjorie gets through the day by drinking the occasional gin, and has led a frustrated non-life of the type Anne was trapped in as the novel opened. Marjorie was a category, a follower of male institutions, and now it’s too late for her to build her own life. Marjorie tells of her daughter, Julia, who, after giving her all for years during the war while her husband was away, found herself deserted and with no money when he came back and went off with another woman – and his salary. Marjorie wants Anna to meet Julia (or the other way round) and tells Anna she will be watching her in her new job and new flat enjoying from afar what she didn’t dare.
There is also some personal self-reflexivity in the film in the way Eleanor Ramsay’s books are marketed. Her name across the top, a cartoon figure of an over-feminized woman at the center, her picture at the back. In the book Anna has two girlfriends who became successful professionals, and details there suggest Joanna Trollope.
Yes it is a fantasy, wish-fulfillment, comfort novel. At the same time it is accurate to see the book and its heroine as in the tradition of 19th century domestic realism novels. Sarah Rigby writes of Anna Bouverie that she
takes a supermarket job because she needs money for her children. She could, more respectably, have chosen to teach, but the shop job seems less burdensome. The entire village (including her husband, the vicar) sees this as an act of betrayal and defiance; she neglects the church flower rota and her parish duties, and is no longer considered capable of ministering to her family’s needs. Alienated, she succumbs to one of many fascinated men, and by doing so precipitates a chain of events which leads to the death of her husband. She makes some money, moves to a smaller house, refuses all offers of help, and reconstructs her identity, to the frustration of her lover, who wants to rescue her himself, and who, ‘when he looked back … saw … her standing in a cage surrounded by people who were either longing to rescue her or determined that she should not escape’. Literature has many such heroines, trapped in stasis and admired as symbols all the subjects of male rescue attempts. Isabel Archer is one, with her sense of marriage as a safety net which would nevertheless trap her as ‘some wild, caught creature in a vast cage’.
It goes without saying that Trollope’s view of the world is not nearly as complicated as James’s, but the attraction to that security and the simultaneous reaction against it is one of her main preoccupations. As her own use of the cage image is developed, it is also subverted: ‘And then suddenly … the cage was empty and Anna had eluded all those people and had run ahead of them. … It was almost, now, as if she were in hiding, and they were all looking for her, guided only by bursts of slightly mocking laughter from her hiding place’ (Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 186, Gale, 2004)
Trollope does break taboos, while keeping her heroines safe by placing them in anachronistic environments. I don’t know if the religious belief in this one is common; there is another good mother superior nun to provide a place for her daughter, a job for her (reminding me of Mother Hildegarde in Outlander). Her heroine’s struggle is that of other heroines of women’s novels, of her readership, and dramatizes their compromised solutions too. In The Rector’s Wife, Trollope is at her best in wry undramatic dramatized moments, as we feel for her characters and ourselves getting through the anxious hard moments of our lives. In this TV series the material is the strongest in the confrontational scenes, and evocative in including shots of landscapes of southeastern England. We are meant also to revel in the loveliness of rural suburban worlds, small towns, with a sense of embedded histories of which this story is just one.
Concluding stills — Anna leaning down in the grass over her husband’s grave, and then walking back to her flat in town
I had wanted to read a book by Joanna Trollope for ever so long; her talk for the Chawton House Lockdown Literary Festival got me to do it. I have her Other People’s Children, Next of Kin, and Sense and Sensibility (which I tried and now want to try gain), all picked up at used book library sales, and have now put Other People’s Children on my nightstand – next to Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard, another novelist who I may now be able to find time and room for as I have stopped spending hours driving places in my car. Middle of the night reading when I need easy company. Have I mentioned what an deft writer Joanna is, concise effective, putting us into the situations she imagines before we are at the bottom of the first page.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Very interesting, Ellen. I wonder why she denies Trollope’s influence on her work when it’s so obvious. I do vaguely remember watching the miniseries when it first came out and her taking the job. Of course, it is common today for husband and wife to work but as a rector’s wife she was breaking taboo so it was very much a book of its time when it was written, but still, Trollope’s influence is there in the characters’ names used and clergy characters. This reminds me of Stephenie Meyers of Twilight fame who denies she ever read or watched vampire material, and yet she opens with a quote from Milton so I know she was familiar with the tradition. Such denials are odd. Anyway, sounds like an interesting book and like it is worthwhile to continue to read more Joanna Trollope.
I don’t understand it either. Further it’s so easy to be found out. To me it suggests a disrespect of the readership. They are assuming 1) most readers will not have read the earlier books; and 2) most readers are so foolish as to think only a book “truly original” can be worthy attention. Most books do not occur in vaccuums at all. I notice the same thing in film adaptations. Repeatedly the adapter claims he or she never saw the earlier ones: it takes more effort, but if the person has watched both Poldarks, you see time and again details in the first not in the book either built on or developed somewhat differently than the book. Debbie Horsfield is glad to admit to reading the book but she did not make the book primary as she claims. She departs from it as much as the first series. Andrew Davies is a rare adapter to admit to watching all previous ones he can get his hands on; he likes to claim he has made a better one, even of so-called geniuses like David Lean.
I noticed in the talk about Joanna Trollope less respect than in others of popular culture where the author is a man.
Glenn Shipway: I read the book recently and thought the ending was poor. In fact, I didn’t enjoy the book at all.
Me: I guess you don’t like stories of women’s liberation? If you read my blog, my comment on the ending is it undermines the premises of the opening, which I think strong; the close is crudely amoral/absurd before returning, opening out into a story once again of a woman freed from one of many patriarchal traps. The cage metaphor comes down to us through the centuries.
Glenn: Ellen, not the case. I didn’t like that story, that is all.
Me: That is a contentless explanation. Why didn’t you like the story?
Glenn: Ellen, it all seemed so contrived to me. I found it difficult to accept what the author was trying to say and, to simply kill off the husband in such a lame way really irked me. It would have been better for her to have simply left her husband when she found that she wasn’t happy. As I said, I didn’t like it. I have 9 more books of hers in my library unread but may try one more before deciding whether to dispose of them.
Me: Well — just a thought — one could say that the reason the story seems contrived is it is a re-telling of a 19th century story in 20th century terms. I wasn’t just putting words together when I suggested this novel is a post-text to Last Chronicle of Barset. It is contrived because it has the template from Anthony Trollope and is re-creating that in 20th century terms by (I think) freeing that abject wife.
I mention late in the blog that there is something strongly anachronistic here: the reviewers and essayists I read said she characteristically chooses these more rural suburbs as well as upper middle class (in education at least) types. This allows her to get away with avoiding the harsh aspects of 20th century life.
I don’t know but I wonder if in the 1990s English people did react in this way against a woman taking a lower status job — you’d have to be in a tight knit community where others thought you had some obligation to them. That’s why Trollope made her a “rector’s wife.”
The terms of the book is that she can’t just leave plus she loves her children very much and to leave them with him would deprive them of her real close concern (he would not put the daughter in the expensive Catholic school, might not sympathize with the son’s wanderlust or sexual experimentation). I can see without neighborhood pressure a woman might be very unwilling to leave the situation even if she is not happy with the husband. Indeed it’s so common for married people even to dislike one another who stay. We are told at one point the harder thing is to leave and, from a woman’s pt of view, I agree. (Though another of these brilliant women’s novels, Elena Ferrante’s Those who Leave and Those who Stay maintains both are hard for women in patriarchal set-ups.)
Joanna Trollope wants to produce a comfort book so makes it easy for Anna to get a job but it is not easy. I found the tone at the end, especially after the husband has partly killed himself, disconcerting. I’d like to try some more — as I’d like to try some more Elizabeth Jane Howard …. One swallow does not tell enough. But I grant this effort seems unlike someone who will eventually produce masterpieces.
Miranda Spatchhurst: “Her modern version of Sense & Sensibility was very good too…
Me: I need to try again. There’s been another very like it: Catherine Shrine’s The Three Weismanns of Westport.
Miranda: It was the 200th Austen Anniversary commission:
Emma Alexander McCall Smith
Northanger Abbey Val McDermid
Sense and Sensibility Joanna Trollope
Pride and Prejudice Curtis Sittenfield
Me: To be honest, I found I could not at all read the McDermid and the descriptions of the others seemed to me a travesty of Austen. Most of the time I dislike sequels, but both the 2 S&S sequels I read about first and they seemed to me to take the story seriously and truly try to re-imagine it. That is true of this re-write of the story of the Crawleys. If contrived in action, the inner life of the story is moving, brilliant and unlike Trollope gives the wife a full identity. Until near the end I found it a good woman’s novel (and the phrase for me is high praise) when the story suddenly swerved into romance, and there was this disconcerting almost unbelievable religiosity (sitting on the grave talking to him), I felt I was in the world of Carousel and other pop entertainments where the afterlife is treated as if it’s a canopy. Maybe there are people who believe this way (think they really are the center of a supernatural universe). I need to read more Joanna Trollope to see if this attitude of mind is found in her other books.
Martha Wishart: A truly modern adaptation would see Rev. Crawley getting therapy and some good anti-depressants, and taking up meditation.
Me: Yes and had Dracula been able to reach blood transfusions in the hospital (and all modern vampires) in modern novels, think of all the ink and ruined clothes that would have been save
Virginia Jensen: I never read the book, but I remember seeing the film. I hated it. Without being a spoiler, I was very, very angry with the wife. One of the things I love about Trollope is that his characters generally have good moral values, even if they are sometimes misplaced (I’m looking at YOU Mrs. Proudie).
Me: Well, until near the end when the novel swerved badly into improbable romance and a Carousel-like ending (the American musical where suddenly the characters are in touch with a canopy Heaven), I thought it was a good book — and its great strength the re-imagining of the Crawleys.
Often Josiah is treated with scorn or irritation by modern readers talking about the book. Joanna Trollope sees him as the unjustly treated tragic figure he is, but someone also (like Crawley) unable to manipulate a world professing to care so much for him but using him indifferent to him as an individual. And she gives Mrs Crawley a life, an identity, a full burden; it’s the same woman brought up to date until near the end.
When I finished LCB, I was angry with Trollope over the way Mrs Crawley was represented but thought it was a savage irony that had Crawley not bullied his wife to the point she was afraid to accept needed money and let him take it, the whole incident would never have happened. She was not so traumatized by having to take charity and be despised, so she would have remembered where the bill came from. And why should she enjoy sex? it was the sudden use of this male as a coming happy marriage partner and the idea this marriage would of course be different that was part of undermined the early parts of the book & film. It’s telling how popular this film was; that it’s made available again in a good redigitalized version.
Janet Landers: I enjoyed both years ago.
Jeen Lee: I enjoyed several of her earlier novels. At least one other novel was dramatized for television. I think it was The Choir.
Me too: So too Other People’s Children.
[…] Dragonfly in Amber, to Anna Bouverie and the Mother Superior Ignazia at St Saviour’s in The Rector’s Wife: Claire is encouraged to become a doctor, Anna, a teacher of German and French. The older woman and […]
[…] Now for the feminist twist: hitherto the Arabins had been slipping these sums of money and other gifts into the silent willing hands of Mrs Crawley, but the husband, indignant and irate that his wife should take it upon herself to accept such moneys and not tell him, demanded that people no longer give Mrs Crawley anything but rather make the offers to him. Now had it been Mrs Crawley whose mind is clearer, she would have been able to account for who gave her these bills in this folder. So his taking over the will of his wife, demanding her abject obedience backfired. I am not sure Trollope meant us to see or himself saw this whirligig of time taking its revenges on Crawley as a merciless bully over his wife. Perhaps Joanna Trollope, though, saw how unfairly Mrs Crawley was treated by him and could not bear her abject life (see my blog on The Rector’s Wife as a post-text to LCB). […]
[…] finished reading the book together, I followed that up with reading Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife and writing a blog-essay on the book as a post-text to Trollope’s novel. I had been during […]
[…] had so enjoyed her The Rector’s Wife a sympathetic modern version of the story of Mrs Crawley from The Last Chronicle of Barset, and the […]