ABSTRACT
Anthony Trollope ends the first chapter of his novel Can You Forgive Her? with a “fact” about his heroine, Alice Vavasor: “And now for my fact: At the time of which I am writing she was already engaged to be married” (ch. 1). Such a “fact” would, of course, end most marriage plot novels, signaling the resolution of the story. We know from the heft of the remaining pages – and from the hints offered by the title – that this “fact” may, in fact, be subject to revision. And indeed, Alice changes her mind about whom and whether she will marry five times in the course of the novel, oscillating between John Grey, the novel’s “worthy man” to whom she is engaged as Can You Forgive Her? opens, and her cousin George, the “wild man” of the novel, to whom she was engaged several years before the action of the novel. The last chapters reestablish Alice’s engagement to John, as the worthy engagement becomes, once again, a fact. Although Alice arguably ends up where she began, the very fact of the long novel, with its reiterative descriptions of Alice’s changes of mind, makes her final situation slightly, significantly, accretively different.
