If you liked 's Tooth and Claw and feel like starting in on Trollope in some parallel novel, try The Claverings. It isn't a perfect parallel, but consider:
"You know her to be treacherous, false, vulgar, covetous, unprincipled. You cannot like her. You say she is a dragon."
"A dragon to you, I said. [...] How am I better than her, and why should I not associate with her?"
"Better than her! As women you are poles asunder."
"But as dragons," she said, smiling, "we come together."
Fortuitous turn of phrase aside, two of the other Tooth and Claw tropes appear: this novel does not allow the maiden once besmirched (though legally) to find love and happiness with Another; and the inheritance of power is pretty grim. There isn't any hungry looming round the deathbed, but the charming hero is very like his unpleasant forbears, it's just that he's charming enough that no-one notices for long. He marries a sweet sprig of the industrial class; maybe she improves their children. Well, also, he is different in having meant to join the industrious before he inherited; he just wasn't reliable at showing up for work.
There doesn't seem to be an online version.
ISBN: 0486234649
So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.). | TrackBack