Recently re-read The Eustace Diamonds, Trollope's 1871 novel about the finer points of property law, inheritance, deception, and, most interesting of all, self-deception. My father always says that the real person to look out for is the person who believes their own lies. That's what this novel is about.

Every year or so, I get a hankering to read a Trollope novel. There are so many of them, I figure that at this rate, I will never run out. Unlike Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, and George Eliot, Trollope is like the cookie jar that never gets empty. He struggled for prominence with company like this. While his writing career spanned four decades, that only meant he was outshined by two successive generations of stars--first it was Dickens and Thackeray, then it was Eliot and James. Trollope was felt to be more prosaic, more materialistic, and more stodgy in his choice of subject and theme--his marriage plots are never far from almost mercenary considerations of money, and he loved to devote hundreds of pages at a stretch to things like internecine church politics or the ways and means of Parliamentary life. But there is something wonderful about him. He's funny, and very smart, and intensely curious, truthful, and also just rock solid. (I know that sounds like I'm describing a person rather than a writing style, but I find it hard to separate those things, and the more I think about it, the more I don't see that as a problem.)

Trollope got going as a novelist when working for the post office in Ireland, where he decided to go when it became clear to him that if he stayed in London working as a low-level civil servant he'd never advance, never make any money, never be able to afford to marry, never have a life. Ireland was the end of the world to aspiring middle-class sorts then, but Trollope preferred banishment with opportunity to London with none. And it worked out wonderfully. He spent long hours traveling from one remote rural location to another for work; the hours allowed him to work out plots and stories, while the people and places gave him material for his first several novels. While in Ireland, he advanced professionally and he became an artist. He also fell in love and got married.

By the time he wrote Eustace Diamonds, Trollope was an established lion of the English literary scene. Ireland was well in the past, and he wrote with a comfort, authority, and humor that enabled him to devise some of the best opening lines in the history of the novel.

Here is paragraph one:

It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies,--who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two,--that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her. She was the only child of old Admiral Greystock, who in the latter years of his life was much perplexed by the possession of a daughter. The admiral was a man who liked whist, wine,--and wickedness in general we may perhaps say, and whose ambition it was to live every day of his life up to the end of it. People say that he succeeded, and that the whist, wine, and wickedness were there, at the side even of his dying bed. He had no particular fortune, and yet his daughter, when she was little more than a child, went about everywhere with jewels on her fingers, and red gems hanging round her neck, and yellow gems pendent from her ears, and white gems shining in her black hair. She was hardly nineteen when her father died and she was taken home by that dreadful old termagant, her aunt, Lady Linlithgow. Lizzie would have sooner gone to any other friend or relative, had there been any other friend or relative to take her possessed of a house in town. Her uncle, Dean Greystock, of Bobsborough, would have had her, and a more good-natured old soul than the dean's wife did not exist,--and there were three pleasant, good-tempered girls in the deanery, who had made various little efforts at friendship with their cousin Lizzie; but Lizzie had higher ideas for herself than life in the deanery at Bobsborough. She hated Lady Linlithgow. During her father's lifetime, when she hoped to be able to settle herself before his death, she was not in the habit of concealing her hatred for Lady Linlithgow. Lady Linlithgow was not indeed amiable or easily managed. But when the admiral died, Lizzie did not hesitate for a moment in going to the old "vulturess," as she was in the habit of calling the countess in her occasional correspondence with the girls at Bobsborough.