Framley Parsonage

4.25/5. I really do think this book hovers between 4 and 4.5 for me. This isn't a book I'd recommend to people who are new to classics or even new to Victorian domestic novels, but if you're already somewhat used to Victorian novels and writing style and are interested in countryside socioeconomic politics revolving around a few families, this is definitely one to explore.

The blurb of this book makes one think that Mark Robarts and his story is the main plotline for this book, but that isn't very accurate. Framley Parsonage is in fact an amalgamation of many different threads, where we follow various different characters and their stories, with the one common thing binding them together is in how they relate to the vicarage of Framley. I almost DNFed this book at the beginning because it seemed pretty heavy going, but I'm really glad I kept at it and ended up enjoying myself a ton by the end.

It's been a while since I last read the previous book in this series or in fact any Trollope, so a lot of the characters that were mentioned or who were themselves protagonists in previous novels were not that familiar to me anymore. I have to say that I was really impressed by the representation of women in this book. We have your ideal submissive wife/mother/housekeeper type, but also women who are politically manipulative, women who are assertive and dominant, women who stand their ground against all odds, women who grit their teeth to carry their families through poverty and want, etc. In fact, I think the female characters in this book are by far more diverse and interesting and display more sense and virtue (different brands of it too) than the men, and I love that this definitely felt like a deliberate storytelling choice from Trollope. Overall though, I enjoyed that the characters really had depth and grayness to them, instead of being one-dimensionally good or bad.

If I had to rank the characters by how much I enjoyed reading about them, Mark Robarts was rank pretty low. If this book had indeed been primarily about his story arc, I might very well have DNFed it or given it a lower rating. He's not exactly villainous, but he was irritatingly blind and self-important at his most foolish and just didn't really show any endearing qualities in the whole book. I definitely loved reading about Fanny Robarts, his wife, and Lucy Robarts, his sister, a lot more. Fanny is the classic ideal of feminine virtue, the perfect mother, wife, and sister, but she is so somehow without being annoyingly Mary Sue-ish. Lucy is an interesting mix of meek and assertive, reticent but talkative. She makes a lot of interesting decisions throughout the book that earned my admiration and my annoyance by turns.

Lady Lufton is quite certainly the Titan of this book imo, as she should be given how big an influence she has at Framley Court and Parsonage. She is a more benevolent version of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and her close relationship with her son Lord Lufton was pretty heartwarming to see. Lord Lufton came pretty close to being your run-of-the-mill careless and self-absorbed young peer, but was saved by his dedication to his mother and to his cause when he decides to take it up.

A totally random thing irrelevant to the plot that struck me while reading this was how people in the 1860s were treating infection. We tend to think that people who lived before the early 20th century were dunces and had no idea about hygiene or infection, so I was surprised when this book dealt with characters understanding the dangers of close contact in a household when someone comes down with an infectious disease, quarantining people from that household in a separate lodging until they have been proven to not have that disease, and even “fumigating” letters coming from that household before opening them. Honestly, these are things I wouldn't have attributed to habits in the 1860s but I'm glad to have had my misconceptions debunked.

I won't go on writing about all the characters but suffice it to say that I had a ball reading about all of them. I was actually pretty sad when this book ended, I kinda felt like I wanted to stay at Framley forever and find out how everyone gets on. I'm excited to continue on to the next book of the series!