Mount of Hope
Colonel William Henry Dermont and his wife, comfortably presiding over their country manor, The Mount, are proud to be marrying their son and heir Alfred to a prize catch, a viscount’s niece named Amelia Thorwold. Alfred, an amiable young man, little considers that he might be making the mistake of his life, although his friend Julia Drummond is striving mightily to save him from a disastrous match.
The outlines of Jamie Michele’s make the book seem like something right out of the heyday of Victorian triple-decker romances, and with good reason: in a charmingly ingenious move, Michele has adapted Mount of Hope from just such a source, the enormous three-volume 1844 novel Young Love written by Frances Trollope (mother of the more famous Anthony).
The tone throughout Mount of Hope is a very conscious – and very successful – Trollopian pastiche, but Michele has successfully tightened up the baggy sections of Mrs. Trollope’s original, eliminated some of its meandering sub-plots and sharpened the remainder, and produced something both winningly reminiscent of the narrative techniques of a bygone era and also subtly modern in its tone. It is a gamble that could easily have backfired, since Mrs. Trollope, though currently out of critical favor, is a deceptively smart author. But here it works beautifully.
Enthusiastically recommended.
