Lady Anna: Classic Literary Fiction (Annotated)

Unique Elements Detailed 19th Century Historical TimelineExplore the wonders and magic of this unforgettable masterpiece and take an exhilarating step back in time!Synopsis: Lady Anna by English author Anthony Trollope is a poignant novel first published in 1874.The story is set in the 1830s, during the period of the First Reform Act of 1832. The late Earl Lovel's daughter, Anna, is the main character and despite his reputation for evilness, her mother married him out of ambition rather than out of love. He revealed that he had a living wife soon after they got married, rendering their union null and void and their newborn daughter illegitimate. Without her, he boarded a ship for Italy and didn't come back to England for 20 years.Over the course of nearly 20 years, Lady Lovel battled to establish the legitimacy of her marriage, her claim to her title, and the parentage of her daughter. During this period, she had neither the public's compassion nor her family's backing; Thomas Thwaite, a radical tailor from Keswick, who provided refuge for her and her daughter and funded her court fights, was her sole friend and backer. And through an extraordinary set of circumstances, Anna falls in love with and becomes engaged to a tailor. The novel describes her attempts to resolve the conflict between her duty to her social class and her duty to the man she loves.Excerpt: ‘Women have often been hardly used by men, but perhaps no harder usage, no fiercer cruelty was ever experienced by a woman than that which fell to the lot of Josephine Murray from the hands of Earl Lovel, to whom she was married in the parish church of Applethwaite,—a parish without a village, lying among the mountains of Cumberland,—on the 1st of June, 181—. That her marriage was valid according to all the forms of the Church, if Lord Lovel were then capable of marrying, no one ever doubted; nor did the Earl ever allege that it was not so. Lovel Grange is a small house, surrounded by a small domain,—small as being the residence of a rich nobleman, lying among the mountains which separate Cumberland from Westmoreland, about ten miles from Keswick, very lovely, from the brightness of its own green sward and the luxuriance of its wild woodland, from the contiguity of overhanging mountains, and from the beauty of Lovel Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded with little islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket of hollies, birch, and dwarfed oaks. The house itself is poor, ill built, with straggling passages and low rooms, and is a sombre, ill-omened looking place. When Josephine Murray was brought there as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but she loved the lakes and mountains, and dreamed of some vague mysterious joy of life which was to come to her from the wildness of her domicile.’