an eye for an eye

An Eye for an Eye by Anthony Trollope (Stein and Day, 1967)

An atypically short, melodramatic, and somewhat risque novel by Trollope. Unlike most of his longer novels, An Eye for an Eye has only one tightly-focussed plot.

Fred Neville becomes heir to Scroope when his ne’er-do-well cousin dies without an heir. He is embraced by the present Earl and his second wife, who regard him as a son and expose him to the ways and reasons of nobility. Fred is a soldier and returns to Ireland to complete his commission, and then plans to return to and reside at Scroope Manor.

But while in Ireland he meets, falls in love with, proposes to, and impregnates a beautiful and innocent country lass, Kate O’Hara, who lives with her fierce widowed mother in an isolated cottage on the cliffs of Mohr. Fred has promised his uncle he will never marry a woman who would make an unsuitable Countess, which, with her dubious breeding and uncultured ways, is exactly what Kate is.

How Fred manages this impossible situation by attempting to keep his promise to both Kate and his uncle is the swift and dramatic action of this book. Unfortunately, none of the characters are well-developed. The book’s brevity and its emphasis on plot prevent Trollope from developing them with his usual empathetic complexity. They are, however, engaging and the book climaxes with an inevitable but somehow still surprising tragic ending at the perilous edge of the cliffs.