TLDR in summary: Better than expected.

Pages: 800+

Finally! I started HKHWR in early 2019, but life happened and back it went into my library. In the meantime, seven years passed and I became a rather sophisticated reader. And since I don’t like loose ends, I decided to finish it, once and for all.

I say that phrase because back in 2019, I read all the way near the second half, but somehow I couldn’t go further. The shenanigans of the pathetic Emily Rowley was too much for me, especially as at the time, I had been sort of depressed and struggling, and the book, especially the first half was mostly about the quarell between husband and wife, and instead of elevating me and making me forget my woes, it was dampening my mood.

However, the willfulness and verbal judo of Emily Rowley against her pitiful, clueless, unwise, and cowardly husband was just a prelude to Trollope’s ambitious attack on radical feminism, and in that context, also on the importance of not creating evil fairies (he implies incompetent mothers like Mrs. French create personalities in their daughters that later become difficult to deal with [actually, the same applies to men as well.]).

This comes to the fore in the second part when the rather strangely named Mr. Glascock tries to woo the American beauty, Caroline, but Caroline’s radical feminist ‘friend’, a woman who is portrayed in the most negative possible manner by Trollope, displays typical man-hating, anti-marriage actions and words; Trollope even calls her a rabid enthusiast, and she is the worst possible example of how a woman shouldn’t be according to Trollope’s conception of womanhood.

But he doesn’t stop there. Elsewhere he mocks the two miss Frenches, where one is an evil fairy, and the other a pitiful being who plays mind games (the very opposite of what Gestalt psychologists call the authentic person); Bella is unauthentic and mediocre, but Camilla is angry, dangerous and strong-willed.

Yet, starting from Camila and going to the other end, he shows a variety of woman archetypes, where on the other end, he shows a model woman, a truly beautiful being (Dorothy). Interestingly, Dorothy’s mother is also somewhat weak and incompetent, and because of this, at first, Dorothy is shown as a meek girl who will probably never amount to much.

But Dorothy rises to all the occasions thrown at her, and becomes an assertive, wise and dignified woman. Here, Trollope shows the influence of environment on our innate core traits–how in the case of Dorothy, these environmental stimuli caused her to blossom, and discover her true, self-actualized self. In this, Trollope is well ahead of Albert Bandura’s ideas on how personality is forged as a continuous flux of environmental stimuli and innate traits that are genetically determined but psychologically formed.

There are other women whose archetypes fall between Dorothy and Bella, some of whom show potential troublesome tendencies (like Nora), though they are otherwise excellent in many respects. Trollope also discusses men, but not as much as he does in Eustace Diamonds. In that book, he seems to take a lens and display archetypes of men, even though the catalysts carrying the story is the diamond heist.

Fortunately, the second half of HKHWR is less depressing and even hilarious in places; I did laugh out loudly in several places; yet, the hilarity is Gogolian and comi-tragic. Trollope mocks inauthentic people like Mr. Gibson, but only as a side note. The main focus is still on the women archetypes.

All in all, a typical Trollope novel: slow and tedious at the beginning, but un-put-downable from the second half onwards.