No Fairy-tale: the Story of Marriage in Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right

Abstract

The first library that gave me a reader’s ticket was the municipal library in Birmingham, when I was a child. Harborne Public Library offered a service which the university libraries that I use these days fail to provide. Or perhaps they have reason to hesitate before the task. In Harborne Library the books were divided strictly into two categories, fiction and non-fiction and they were issued on separate tickets. As a child, I was given a ticket for each one; they did not let us take out storybooks on the ticket meant for non-fiction. At the time I sensed an implied rebuke, without examining what might lie behind it but today, as I sit down to write about fictions of adultery, I come to a pause. I find myself asking today whether I believe that a taste for fiction is really less commendable than a taste for what passes itself off as the truth. And I wonder on what shelf and in what library I should find a book that would tell the truth about marriage.