ABSTRACT
Few studies on Anthony Trollope’s approach to gender relations notice the heroine in Kept in the Dark , a short novel published a few weeks before the novelist died in December 1882. Yet at the time, some reviews expressed considerable regard and sympathy for Cecilia Western (née Holt), who in the novel’s first half elaborates her struggles to tell the man she loves and marries, George Western, her story of jilting a previous fiancé when it would seem to mock his disclosure that a woman had jilted him. In the second half, she suffers further after Western learns of her past engagement from the ex-fiancé and abandons their marriage. The reviewer in the Spectator notes, for instance, that “we sympathize throughout with the heroine,” 2 while the Graphic’s commentator declares that Cecilia “must in all respects retain a high place in Mr. Trollope’s gallery of heroines,” and that he “has certainly not often made young ladies talk better than in these pages.” 3 Others responded to the story more dismissively, however, with the writer in the British Quarterly Review concluding that readers “never really see” the heroine, who remains a “shadow made by a fine nature on Mr. Trollope’s mind.” 4 This critic also declares that Trollope’s story “bears no mark of progress in any respect” (501), while that in the Spectator describes Kept in the Dark as “a very pleasant little book,” but “one of the least important of Mr. Trollope’s works,” notable only for being one of his last novels (20 Jan. 1883, Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage , 500). Such judgments have led to a dearth of material on Kept in the Dark , and scarcely a story to tell of the heroine’s reception.
