The Phineas Finn Series by Anthony Trollope (Books 1 & 2)
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Overview:
Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Among his best-loved works is a series of novels collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which revolves around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters. Trollope’s literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century. One of Trollope’s best points was his brilliant understanding of women: the son of the writer and traveller Fanny Trollope, he admired strong and intelligent women. He is a far more modern writer than Dickens, even though they are almost exact contemporaries: the world he describes, whether Britain’s or around the world, is much closer to ours. In all, Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, as well as dozens of short stories and a few extremely good travel books. The two novels here are acknowledged as perhaps the most delightful Victorian political novels of their time, perceptive and funny – and not a little relevant to politics today.
Genre: Fiction, novel, literature, classic, politics, Great Britain
1. Phineas Finn: The Irish Member
The novel follows the early fortunes of the young Member of Parliament Phineas Finn. Phineas is a handsome, clever and ambitious young man, the only son of a capable but not over-endowed Irish country doctor. Through his father’s long friendship with one of his patients, Lord Tulla, he gets the offer of a pocket borough in Galway. His life is transformed. He is at once in London: and his charm and quick mind and his social success lead him from one good contact to another.
But if his brain is cool and resourceful, his heart is ever susceptible. He has already left behind a secret fiancée in his home town. But almost immediately he is dallying with the rich and influential Lady Laura Standish, then with another charming young heiress, Lady Violet Effingham, and a widowed millionairess, Madame Max Goesler. By now a rising young politician (despite the complications of his love life) Phineas becomes a Junior Minister at The Treasury, only for his whole career to come to grief in the steamy morass of the Irish question, which brings down the government, and incidentally, abolishes his seat. In that depressed mood, he returns to Ireland…
2. Phineas Redux
In this follow-up, which takes Phineas Finn at a low point in his life, seven years after the end of the previous volume, the author shows a remarkably prescient sense of the importance of intrigue, bribery, and sexual scandal, and the power of the press to make or break a political career. Now a widower, Phineas returns to London and the social and political scene. Trollope portrays vividly the complex nature of Phineas’s romantic entanglements with three powerful women: the fascinating Madame Max Goesler, the devoted Laura Kennedy, and the irrepressible Lady Glencora (now Duchess of Omnium). The book skilfully weaves public events and private passions, features strong female characters, and plays with analogies, both subtle and comic, between the different kinds of action (politics, hunting, romance).
"There are certain chapters in the middle of Phineas Redux that are Trollope at the highest power…. It is in these chapters in Redux that have to do with Kennedy’s growing madness (his attack on Phineas in the lodging is a grand piece of dramatic writing), Laura Kennedy’s hopeless love for Phineas, and Phineas’ quarrel with Bonteen that Trollope is at his very finest … an absolute modern. No post war-psychoanalytic realist can teach him anything. He seems in these passages to know all the morbid obscurities of the human heart."-Walpole
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