Barchester Towers pretends to be nothing more than a comic novel about fierce but harmless battles over power, status, and marriage that divide the secure world of an English cathedral town, a place where nothing serious ever happens. In its portrait of a small community altered by vast changes in politics, religion, and culture, it is also an ambitious study of the ways in which large forces affect individual lives.
And in its account of the anarchic power of sex in the repressed and proper world of an Anglican cathedral town, it rises to the level of myth: It is a story in which the instinctive force of Eros disrupts the civilized order and defeats those who want power rather than love. Trollope can always be relied on for a readable story with a varied cast of plausible characters in a plausible social setting, and for many decades he was valued for the comfort and security that his books seemed to offer.
One widely cited example: In England, sales of his novels markedly increased during World War II, especially in times of massive bombing raids over London.
Trollope also had a darker edge than he wanted to admit to himself, especially in such later novels as The Way We Live Now, a cynical account of personal and public corruption, and He Knew He Was Right, a story of obsessive and destructive marital jealousy. Trollope often expresses his feelings about culture, society, and the sexes with table-thumping intensity, but his most intense feelings were always mixed feelings, even if he was not consciously aware of how mixed they were.
The love stories in his novels illustrate his way of combining overt simplicity and covert complexity. Trollope repeatedly declares his preference for the reticent, unassertive women suitable to this kind of plot, and equally often declares his distaste for overbearing women such as Mrs. Proudie in Barchester Towers and for the independent-minded young feminists who appear in his later novels. Yet Trollope tends to give his unassertive young heroines at least one moment of assertiveness that he clearly regards as triumphant.
