Kept in the Dark

Completed only a few months before his death, Kept in the Dark is one of Trollope's most captivating novels. Yet unlike Trollope's other major novels - the Palliser series, The Claverings, the Barsetshire novels - Kept in the Dark succeeds without the use of considerable length or legions of characters that many thought were essential to his fictional world. Kept in the Dark is a probing psychological portrait of the near destruction of a marriage - a novel that combines keen insights with vigorous emotional strength. Jealousy, guilt, excessive pride, and compulsion all sweep across its surface: in George Western, the self-willed and fatally-proud husband, who would rather destroy his own happiness than admit to any moral strain in his character; in Cecilia Western, whose peculiar mixture of pride and submissiveness forces her inexorably toward deceit; in the grinding hypocrisy of Cecilia's friend, Miss Altifiorla; in the overwhelming egotism of the rejected suitor, Sir Francis Geraldi