The Widow Barnaby. Vol. 1 (of 3)

In the suffocating little town of Devonshire, the Compton sisters face a brutal truth: their futures depend entirely on whom they marry. Miss Martha Compton, sharp-tongued and proud, watches her younger sister Sophia drift into the matchmaking maze their ambitious mother has constructed, while their timid father, Reverend Josiah Compton, drowns in the demands of feminine vanity and household debt. When the enigmatic Widow Barnaby arrives on the scene, she brings with her a fortune and a freedom that makes her the most eligible woman in the county, much to the Calculate scheming of Mrs. Compton, who sees another daughter's chances slipping away. Frances Milton Trollope, writing with the same satirical blade she brought to her celebrated novels, dissects the desperate arithmetic of provincial marriage: every ball, every glance, every borrowed gown is a tactical maneuver in a game where the stakes are poverty or prosperity. The widow herself proves an unsettling figure, her independence both magnet and threat to a society where women own nothing and are valued only for their marketability. This is Trollope at her most wickedly observant, skewering the polite cruelties of class ambition and the crushing narrowness of women's options in early Victorian England.