[This document is a note to the author's Trollope's Comfort Romances for Men: Heterosexual Male Heroism in his Work — GPL.]
See for example where the narrator lightly condemns Jack's cool promiscuity (12:116); the novel remains ambivalent on the issue of how cruel and risky it is to assume you can play lightly with other people's emotions (27:266)
Trollope's narrator begins Is He Popenjoy? by telling us its story is "in nature akin" to that of a "poor Mrs Jones, who was happy enough down in Devonshire till that wicked Lieutenant Smith came down and persecuted her:
You remember Mary Walker. Oh yes, you do — that pretty girl, but such a queer temper! And how she was engaged to marry Harry Jones, and said she wouldn't at the church door, till her father threatened her with bread and water; and how they have been living ever after as happy as two turtle-doves down in Devonshire, till that scoundrel, Lieutenant Smith, went to Bideford! Smith has been found dead at the bottom of a saw-pit. Nobody's sorry for him. She's in a madhouse at Exeter; and Jones has disappeared, and couldn't have had more than thirty shillings in his pocket'.
Last modified 9 August 2006