The novels of Anthony Trollope are often treated as Victorian-lite, even though he deals with many of the same social and psychological issues as his canonized fellows do (Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell). But his touch is jauntier. His focus is always on figuring out how to put up with the way things are.

Up to this point, my favorite Trollope novels have always been in his Barchester series--tales of the political complications and secular lives of provincial Church of England vicars and their families. But last summer, wandering through a used bookstore, I took a notion to bring home Phineas Finn, and this spring I finally got around to reading it. As soon I finished, I ordered its sequel, Phineas Redux, and this is what I have to say about these very odd yet conventional novels:

• Phineas is a handsome young member of Parliament whom all women adore. But he is neither grandly indifferent to his good looks nor a villainous Casanova. Instead, he is bumbling, well meaning, honorable, confused, embarrassed, susceptible--aware that women love him but doing his best to negotiate that awkward truth.
• The most intense love passages in these novels involve women over the age of 30.
• The married woman who throws herself at Phineas is treated with sympathy, tact, and respect. 
• Phineas falls in and out of love with numerous women. He is affected by beauty, money, political connections, and sweetness. He loves the women who love him first and who aren't afraid to show it.

I can't think of any other Victorian novels that deal with love in this straightforward, worldly, yet very humane way. No one could call them erotic, but they do acknowledge that older women fall in love, that love isn't maidenly, that women can ask men to marry them, and that a person can be in love with more than one person at a time. Doesn't this seem remarkable?