A Village Affair
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"An elegantly crafted dissection of English rural life among the well-heeled and privileged...A considerable achievement", Christine Hickman, Woman's Journal ."A story of seduction - not only sexual seduction but the irresistible appeal of money, beautiful objects, charming manners...excellent", Penny Perrick, The Sunday Times ."A richly textured and immensely readable novel", The Sunday Times
Book Description
A stylish, warm, sometimes comical, sometimes loving story of a marriage, a family, and a village affair.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Joanna Trollope has once again proven her ability to portrait each character so well that it is impossible to take sides. She also shows that it is not always necessary to go into juicy detail. Her novels tell more about the status of women in British society than any thesis could. The ending of this book is not a happy ending in the American sense but a truly hopeful one, which makes this book very realistic and lets the reader identify themselves with the characters. Anyone who has ever been in a crisis knows how impossible it is to describe one's feelings as long as it is still going on. "A Village Affair" shows too how dependant we are on other people's opinion and how impossible it is to please everyone - including oneself. So when Alice breaks free it makes the reader feel very relieved.
Format:Paperback
Oh dear - this was a big disappointment after Trollope's 'The Choir'. A real pity as the main theme - woman in fairly humdrum marriage suddenly discovers that she's got lesbain leanings - could have been really interesting.
The story in short: Alice Jordan is married to the rich, rather dull solicitor Martin, and in an overly close relationship with her 'lady of the manor' mother-in-law Cicely, a gardening writer who has never recovered from the death of her first lover, which put pay to her career as a singer. Alice has clung to Martin and to Cicely and her exquisite manor house, 'Dummeridge', partly as an escape from her own neurotic mother and womanizing English lecturer father. She and Martin have three small, bratty children (this book is a good advert for never having kids!), a wonderful house in a small village outside Salisbury, and pots of money. However, Alice, an artist, is depressed - until the local Lord of the Manor's (another Manor, not Cicely's) daughter Clodagh comes home from the USA. Before long, Clodagh has seduced Alice, and they are having a passionate affair - but not before Martin has tried to get in with Clodagh too. Unfortunately, Alice's lesbian passion is short-lived; Martin's bad-brother Anthony turns up, keen to revenge himself after Alice spurned his advances some years before, and immediately works out what's going on. Of course, all hell breaks loose, and Alice, like many a Trollope heroine, has some impossible decisions to make.
I would have found the Alice/Clodagh affair very interesting had Trollope tried at all to make Clodagh sympathetic. But she's such a spoilt little rich girl that it's hard to understand the attraction between the two women, or why Alice even contemplates living with Clodagh. Martin is also so incredibly boring that it's difficult to see why Alice married him. This coupled with Clodagh's manipulativeness means Alice's dilemma at the end has no weight at all: to quote a music critic writing on Wagner's opera Tannhauser, Alice is caught 'between the devil and the shallow grey sea'. Trollope also implies throughout, using various of her characters to do so, that Alice's lesbianism is somehow 'wrong' which is mildly offensive. Trollope may not have intended this, but it is what comes across. The story is set in an irritatingly twee village (I've spent large amounts of time in Salisbury and the countryside around and have never come across a village like it) with a lot of aristocratic/rustic locals called things like Lettice, and a jovial vicar. The children are so unpleasant - one a spoilt tantrum-thrower, the other a cry-baby, and the baby only there to fill his nappy every now and then - that one wonders why Alice doesn't just abandon them all and go abroad or something. There are some interesting moments. Cicely would be quite an interesting character if Trollope didn't turn her into a dominating caricature in the later parts of the novel; there is a good scene where Cicely's husband confesses to Alice his misery that his wife has never really shown him love and his awareness of how he and his wife have failed their sons; and Trollope writes quite well towards the end of the book about Alice's amiable father, even though the mother fails to ever have much personality. But one's left feeling that a potentially very good idea for a novel has been wasted. Not one of her best by a long way!
The story in short: Alice Jordan is married to the rich, rather dull solicitor Martin, and in an overly close relationship with her 'lady of the manor' mother-in-law Cicely, a gardening writer who has never recovered from the death of her first lover, which put pay to her career as a singer. Alice has clung to Martin and to Cicely and her exquisite manor house, 'Dummeridge', partly as an escape from her own neurotic mother and womanizing English lecturer father. She and Martin have three small, bratty children (this book is a good advert for never having kids!), a wonderful house in a small village outside Salisbury, and pots of money. However, Alice, an artist, is depressed - until the local Lord of the Manor's (another Manor, not Cicely's) daughter Clodagh comes home from the USA. Before long, Clodagh has seduced Alice, and they are having a passionate affair - but not before Martin has tried to get in with Clodagh too. Unfortunately, Alice's lesbian passion is short-lived; Martin's bad-brother Anthony turns up, keen to revenge himself after Alice spurned his advances some years before, and immediately works out what's going on. Of course, all hell breaks loose, and Alice, like many a Trollope heroine, has some impossible decisions to make.
I would have found the Alice/Clodagh affair very interesting had Trollope tried at all to make Clodagh sympathetic. But she's such a spoilt little rich girl that it's hard to understand the attraction between the two women, or why Alice even contemplates living with Clodagh. Martin is also so incredibly boring that it's difficult to see why Alice married him. This coupled with Clodagh's manipulativeness means Alice's dilemma at the end has no weight at all: to quote a music critic writing on Wagner's opera Tannhauser, Alice is caught 'between the devil and the shallow grey sea'. Trollope also implies throughout, using various of her characters to do so, that Alice's lesbianism is somehow 'wrong' which is mildly offensive. Trollope may not have intended this, but it is what comes across. The story is set in an irritatingly twee village (I've spent large amounts of time in Salisbury and the countryside around and have never come across a village like it) with a lot of aristocratic/rustic locals called things like Lettice, and a jovial vicar. The children are so unpleasant - one a spoilt tantrum-thrower, the other a cry-baby, and the baby only there to fill his nappy every now and then - that one wonders why Alice doesn't just abandon them all and go abroad or something. There are some interesting moments. Cicely would be quite an interesting character if Trollope didn't turn her into a dominating caricature in the later parts of the novel; there is a good scene where Cicely's husband confesses to Alice his misery that his wife has never really shown him love and his awareness of how he and his wife have failed their sons; and Trollope writes quite well towards the end of the book about Alice's amiable father, even though the mother fails to ever have much personality. But one's left feeling that a potentially very good idea for a novel has been wasted. Not one of her best by a long way!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Good Read
I really enjoyed this book. It is the first of Joanna Trollope's novels for me and I am now reading my second Marrying the Mistress. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Louisa
Thoughts on A VILLAGE AFFAIR
I have never read a Trollope novel before, but I was given a copy of THE VILLAGE AFFAIR by one of my daughters recently, so I ploughed my way through it. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Dr. Charles Muller
Unconvincing characters
When I read the synopsis for this book I thought "Well, it sounds like she's going to become a lesbian, but surely they wouldn't give something like that away on the back cover,... Read more
Published on 20 Nov 2009 by Rachel
Well written, as usual
Another well written novel by Ms Trollope, whose narrative flair manages to hold your attention even when you get annoyed by some of the narrow caricatures she presents. Read more
Published on 23 April 2008 by TJB
Blue Peter Lesbians
Lesbian books are a rarer commodity then id like them to be, and so when i find out about this kind of book im much more inclined to like it then your average novel. Read more
Published on 17 Feb 2007 by Dm Wilde
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