Will this house visit ever end?
Yes. But not without some mistakes.
Alice has been staying at Matching for some time with Glencora and Mr. Palliser and their various friends. She has survived the visit from Lady Midlothian. People speculate Jeffrey Palliser will marry her and she’ll become the mother of the next Duke of Omnium! Her life certainly changed in the course of one visit with her friend.
But she’s leaving the next day and before she goes Glencora is convinced they must take a walk in the moonlight…
Chapter Summary:
The Priory Ruins & Alice Leaves the Priory
No one thinks this walk is a good idea. It’s December and very cold. Jeffrey only agrees to go so he can smoke. Alice goes because she is Glencora’s friend and wants to support her in front of some of the guests (including Mr. Bott.) Glencora knows Mr. Bott thinks this is a frivolous romantic thing to do and if anything that is what is driving her to do it. Her husband suggests she stay inside but he won’t command her— she’ll only stay if he does. It’s an interesting impasse.
Well, they go out. And they go out late: after 10 PM. They walk around and Glencora brings up her first lover, Burgo Fitzgerald. She married Plantangent instead of Burgo and she’s never forgiven herself. She tried to run away with him once but Alice stopped her. Her marriage is, she feels, essentially adultery against Burgo. Since her marriage is childless she wants to abandon it and allow Mr. Palliser to divorce her and replace her with someone more fertile. (I really do not think they have even been married more than a year? I just feel like I have to keep reminding us that Glencora is not exactly proved infertile yet) Alice has heard this before but there’s new details!
Glencora will be taken to a party at a house called Monkshade, owned by Burgo’s relatives. He’s always at this party and she worries if she sees him she’ll run away with him. She’s tried to explain this to Mr. Palliser but he has told her, essentially, to grin and bear it. Alice begs Glencora to be plain with Plantegnent: tell him she might run off if she sees Burgo because she can’t control herself. But Glencora has been as plain as pride will allow. Also, she isn’t really listening, as Alice realizes,
Lady Glencora was more occupied with her own thoughts than with her friend's advice
When they do go in Plantagenant is annoyed they stayed out for so long. His wife is swept away to warm up. Alice notices no one is concerned about her —but actually Jeffrey is. Jeffrey gently presses his courtship and Alice turns him down.
So Alice goes upstairs really without allies (aside from Glencora who isn’t listening to her). Mr. Bott, Mr. Palliser and now Jeffrey Palliser have all either been turned aside or are irritated with her. It seems the social ground she gained at this party, dining with dukes and famous poets, has all been lost.
But she still has power. Miss Iphigenia Palliser comes to her room to try to scheme a way to keep Glencora from running away with Burgo. Alice protests that her friend is innocent and needs to be protected from falling— not punished. They don’t agree on this but they do agree that Glencora shouldn’t go to Monkshade. But do they have the power to do anything about it?
In the morning it seems like they don’t. Alice has her breakfast and leaves. Mr. Palliser does not say he hopes to see her again but Glencora says they will see one another in the city.
What do you do when your friend isn’t listening?
These two friends are going through it! Their house-party romance is showing the strain.
Alice is in a difficult position because her friend really isn’t in a great place and Alice can’t do much except wait, listen, and try to limit the amount of harm Glencora can cause herself. Reading this I was reminded that I have been both Alice and Glencora in different friendships at different times.
When Alice suggests, gently, that they stay home to keep Mr. Palliser happy Glencora says she’ll never forgive her if she abandons her. Alice thinks,
she was also becoming a little afraid of her friend,—afraid that she would be driven some day either to throw her over, or to say words to her that would be very unpalatable.
This passage speaks of the real danger Glencora’s behavior it putting their friendship in. Because Glencora raises the stakes of every interaction to “you’re with me or against me” a little walk in the moonlight becomes almost a political statement. it definitely affected Alice’s relationships at Matching.
The way Glencora is living is not sustainable. That is, maybe, the point. Glencora isn’t rooted in her life or her marriage; she has no desire to sustain things. She probably behaves towards Alice with more intentionality and respect than she behaves towards anything else in her life but it’s not clear that’s going to be enough to hold them together. Alice’s main emotion towards Glencora isn’t love right now but specifically concerned love, as is apparent when she thinks of her cousin as a “poor deluded unreasoning creature”
Alice, moreover, had become painfully conscious that the poor deluded unreasoning creature had taught herself to think that she might excuse herself for this sin to her own conscience by the fact that she was childless, and that she might thus give to the man who had married her an opportunity of seeking another wife who might give him an heir.
My first thought was this is pretty harsh! After all isn’t Glencora just championing a more emotional, honest, version of relationships than Alice, trapped in Victorian morals, can understand? Glencora sees herself as untrue and unfaithful but to Burgo, not Palliser. She explains,
“"No," she said, "no; I am not honest. By law I am his wife; but the laws are liars! I am not his wife. I will not say the thing that I am. When I went to him at the altar, I knew that I did not love the man that was to be my husband.”
When Glencora declares “the laws are liars” I was reminded of the revolutionary relationship between George Eliot and George Lewes.
Lewes and Eliot, caught in a position where they couldn’t marry, established a sort of marriage of their own when they eloped together to Europe. Clare Carlisle really unpacks the situation around the Lewes/Eliot elopement and I highly recommend the book! But Eliot lost all her respectability and her access to many of her female friends. This is what Alice fears when she sees Glencora making these rash choices. Of course, Glencora is a spoiled heiress; I’m not going to pretend that Glencora is a secret George Eliot in Trollope’s text waiting to be activated by a feminist lens.
No.
But it’s interesting to consider the real ramifications of Glencora’s “willing” marriage to Plantagenet. Is Trollope facing us with the real consequences of the “property arrangement as marriage” that the aristocracy faces? I think so. We’ll see more and more property and marriage in the next chapter so this is definitely a theme to keep an eye on.
If you’re going through it with a friend because they didn’t get to marry the hot guy they wanted to—or like some other reason—Drop it in the comments!
Next time, George writes a really important letter and Burgo finally gets some column inches.