Earlier this week, as I was reading the title story of William Trevor's collection After Rain, I suddenly came across a reference to The Small House at Allington. The protagonist, who had just been jilted, was reading it, half-heartedly, as she attempted to come to terms with her inability to hold  another person's love.

Though Trevor did not draw any sort of link between the plot of his story and the plot of Trollope's novel, The Small House at Allington is a supremely poor choice for anyone who has just ended a love affair, as jilting is its primary subject. For me (as perhaps Trevor had hoped), simply reading the title within the context of "After Rain" made me shiver. It also made me realize why I hadn't reread the book myself for thirty years.

The Small House at Allington is one of Trollope's best novels. It's part of his Barsetshire Chronicles, a series of books set in a fictional rural English county and concerning the doing of vicars and landowners, their daughters and mothers and curates and neighbors. This all sounds harmless enough, but Trollope is a sensitive prober of the Victorian heart, and he does this particularly well in The Small House. The central character is Lily Dale, who falls in love with, and gets engaged to, Mr. Crosbie, who then jilts her for the daughter of an earl. In the meantime, a local boy, Johnny Eames, who has always loved Lily, tries to convince her to marry him. But Lily, as much as she likes Johnny, can't get over Mr. Crosbie, and that's how the novel ends: Mr. Crosbie knows he's made a terrible mistake, Johnny can't get the woman he loves to love him, and Lily is too stubborn about her first love to take a venture on a second.

I can't usually date the exact time I first read a well-loved book, but The Small House is an exception. I bought a brand-new paperback in July 1991 and took it with me to read on my honeymoon. Hour after hour I sat curled into the red-sand dunes or perched on grassy knolls or swathed myself in the lumpy inn beds of Prince Edward Island and devoured the sad story of Lily and Johnny. It was a terrible choice for a honeymoon book; but, perhaps as Trevor's main character noticed, it's also a compulsive read. Page after page, it goes down like nectar, and meanwhile the reader becomes increasingly nonplussed . . . Here I was, on my honeymoon, immersed in a story in which everything goes wrong with love . . . and the novelist refuses to fix it! He could have easily fixed it! Johnny and Lily are clearly meant for one another; they are everything that is delightful. Crosbie is a bounder and deserves to see Lily happy with another lover. But Trollope wouldn't do it.

My honeymoon was not the last time I ever read The Small House. But I certainly haven't read it often since then. When I'm scanning the shelves looking for something to read, my mind tends to wince away from it. The pain of the characters lingers, not least because the novel is charming and rich. And now that I've been married for more than 30 years, Johnny and Lily's tale has become sad in a different way. In the novel they are young people who do not marry. But in other, later Bartsetshire novels their names occasionally come up, as distant mentions--always as people who never married, always as people who were disappointed in love. Trollope hints at their aging loneliness, though he does not deeply examine that in any subsequent novel. As a result they never quite disappear, they never resolve . . . always they remain sad shadows. It's hard not to take this to heart. It's hard not to feel that some message is being conveyed to me, some reminder.

And so I am reading The Small House again, and maybe I will find out.