Miss MacKenzie -- Summer Book 6

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There are no good covers of this book.
Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trollope

It's been quite a while since I made time for a Trollope novel, and I've missed them!  I love Trollope's writing.  Miss Mackenzie has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a little while now; I found this nice old Oxford Classics edition from the 1920s that's in really good shape still, and a pretty olive green with art deco gold designs on the spine.  On the back flyleaf, somebody parked a needle many years ago, and now it's rusty.

Miss Mackenzie is not your average novelistic heroine.  She is thirty-five, not particularly beautiful or educated, and she's spent nearly the last 20 years nursing her father and then her brother.  Now she has a small fortune to live on, and no knowledge whatsoever of the world she so desperately wants to see more of.  So she moves to "Littlebath," a small city, and hopes to find congenial society.

What she mostly finds is that Littlebath is divided and she's supposed to pick sides, which she doesn't want to do.  Moreover, everyone seems interested in her money and not a lot else.  Miss Mackenzie has FOUR suitors in this novel, and while two of them genuinely like her, they all propose to use her money.  Her female relatives all want a cut too (preferably all of it).  Is anybody ever going to want Miss Mackenzie around because she is a kind, intelligent, loving woman?

For a while I thought this story would be kind of slow, but I was wrong.  I could hardly put it down for the whole second half!  It gets really suspenseful.  Oh, it was really good.  Trollope fans will not be disappointed by this one.  And Lady Glencora Palliser makes a cameo appearance, too.

Comments

  1. Karen K.July 9, 2018 at 3:51 AM

    It's been awhile since I read this one but I remember rather liking it -- it was a combined edition by OUP with Cousin Henry, which I didn't like as much. I'm finding Trollope's shorter novels to be rather hit or miss but this was one of the better ones. I think he really needs time to weave a great plot and develop all his characters.

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  2. Joy Weese MollJuly 11, 2018 at 11:38 AM

    This sounds like something I would enjoy. I can't remember if I've read Trollope, possibly in high school.

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  3. JeanJuly 13, 2018 at 8:55 AM

    Oh, Joy! Brit-lovers MUST read Trollope! Start with the Barchester novels. :)

    ReplyDelete

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