Kept in the Dark

by Anthony Trollope

"Kept in the Dark" is a subtle study of a man's jealousy and indignation. Unlike Trevelyan in "He Knew He Was Right," who is wrongly convinced of his wife's past. Before her marriage to Western, Cecilia Holt was engaged to the spiteful, conceited Sir Francis Geraldine. As she is unable to find the right moment to confide this to her husband, Western discovers the fact from Geraldine himself, and in a fit of wounded pride deserts his young wife, refusing to hear the truth from her lips.

Originally published in serial form May through December, 1882, in Good Words and in book form in 1882. Trollope died during the last month of serial publication.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Victorian, British Literature, 19th Century, Classic Literature, English Literature

253 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1882

About the author

Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day.

Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_...

Reviews

[Bionic Jean · Rating 1 out of 5]

An extremely disappointing novel from a major author. Trollope is usually so "modern" both in his easy use of colloquial and conversational language, and his depiction of women. It is hard to credit that this novel focussing on women's acceptance of "their place" is by the same author. It is a very late work, so maybe this accounts for it. With his enormous output of excellent novels, this one really should be laid to rest.

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe 3.5. I enjoyed it because I love Anthony Trollope's writing, but definitely not one of his best.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Goodreads description is good enough. Cecilia Holt was engaged to Sir Francis Geraldine before she realized he was an absolute jerk (my word) and ended the engagement. She and her widowed mother left for Italy for a year where Cecilia met George Weston. George and Celilia fell in love and married, while George was kept in the dark about Cecilia's former engagement. Oh yes, there had been lots of hand wringing about how and when to tell him, but the right moment never seemed to come. But for her secret she was completely happy. Let him only be kept in the dark and he would be happy always. She idolised him as her own.

I didn't stop to count how many times the phrase "kept in the dark" was used, but it was a LOT. Perhaps not enough times to make this a short story, but there was so much repetitiveness in this that I wondered more than once if it would have been better as a short story.

This came late in Trollope's life - in fact he died when the last installment was published. I thought he had not lost his wonderful writing style. I think it possible that he had run out of stories to tell and that he was in such a habit of writing that he didn't know how to just let it go. This may not be the worst of Trollope's offerings, but I'm giving it only a very weak third star.

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read the first part and the beginning of what must be the second movement but already I'm deeply involved. He does that, does Trollope, hooks you. Or me anyway.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in a rush because I really wanted to know why it’s my friend Jo’s least favorite Trollope. 😂 This novel is basically the central storyline in Trollope’s ‘He Knew He Was Right’ with a happier ending. (Well, possibly happier. It depends on how one reads it.) This novel features yet another male character who is prideful almost to insanity. By insanity, I mean without the ability to reason. I find these characters in Trollope especially maddening but inevitably interesting. I always get emotionally invested so I enjoyed reading this more than Cousin Henry and The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, which are my two least favorite Trollopes so far.

Despite one of the male character’s prideful obstinacy and wrath, there is enough truth in the portrayal of his marriage to be uncomfortable. Though I think Mr W is extreme, his behavior plays out in small ways all the time in all kinds of relationships. It’s so easy for me to be so invested in my idea of right (especially regarding another person’s behavior) that I become unreasonable and refuse to be curious and ask questions. In that respect, I think this book is quite sobering and carries weight as a cautionary tale. The side plot of Sir F and Miss A was amusing but they are such awful characters.

Ultimately, I prefer Trollope’s longer novels with multiple plot threads. With these shorter novels, there tends to be a lot of repetition of the main conflict and the character development is much less nuanced.

[John Darnielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third Trollope I’ve read in a month; both insightful and rich with the frustrations of Victorian tendencies, wittily told, keenly plotted; the only other Trollope I have in the house is one of the Palliser novels and I’m not ready for that yet so tomorrow I must find new company for the time being. It is a tribute to Trollope’s way with a story that I turn toward new reading adventures with a pang of regret, and in expectation of joining up with him as soon as I happen on a copy of Doctor Thorne.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kept in the Dark is one of Trollope's lesser-known efforts, published just before his death in 1882. Like the brilliant He Knew He Was Right, it examines a husband's jealous suspicions of his wife, though here the suspicion is of past infidelity rather than present. After their marriage, George Western discovers that his wife Cecilia was engaged to Sir Francis Geraldine; because she never revealed this to Western, he feels indignantly that he has been "kept in the dark" and leaves her.

Though not as powerful as He Knew He Was Right (one of my favorite Trollope novels), Kept in the Dark shows Trollope's penetrating insight and sharp characterization, particularly in the person of Miss Altifiorla, a selfish former friend of Cecilia Western's who is instrumental in revealing her secret to her husband.

[Hope · Rating 2 out of 5]

If this had been my first Trollope novel, it would certainly have been my last. Cecelia Western has kept a secret from her husband hoping to protect him from pain. When he learns it, he treats her cruelly. Will they ever be able to forgive one another?

The melodrama and anguish over the secret was pretty heavy for a Trollope novel. It made me homesick for the Barsetshire series where there is little action, but much insight into human nature. Plus an occasional dry witticism. This book had zero humor to relieve the agony.

This 92 page novella (not the 500+ pages mentioned in the Goodreads description) was completed just months before Trollope's death. Save yourself from suffering and read The Warden instead.

[Maan Kawas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this novel by Anthony Trollope about love, marriage, trust, revenge, forgiveness, truth, dignity, and friendship.

[Pgchuis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-read 2024: I enjoyed this more this time round and am more tolerant of the things I criticized in 2015.

3.5* rounded up. Remarkably short for a Trollope novel, it felt a bit like an undeveloped first draft or proposal. Cecelia gets engaged to Sir Francis, but becomes disenchanted with him and breaks off the engagement. She and her mother go abroad to get over this episode and there she meets George Western and marries him. For one reason and another she never gets round to telling him about her previous engagement and eventually the meddling Sir Francis spills the beans and George is devastated.

The first few chapters dealing with the period up to the breaking off of the first engagement are written in rather a superficial style, but then things settled down to unremitting misery for most of the rest of the novel. Many of the emotions expressed and positions taken by Mr and Mrs Western echoed those developed at greater length in "He Knew He Was Right". Miss Altifiorla (difficult name!) was a good character, but Sir Francis got more and more dastardly as the book went in. What was the wrong he wanted revenge on Mr Western for? Was it just the questioning of the gambling debt? I liked the roles of Sir Francis' sidekicks in speaking reason to him. I liked the explanation that Cecelia first does not tell George her story because it is so similar to his own that she doesn't want him to think she is mocking him - a very British sense of embarrassment!

I thought Trollope was interesting on the expectation a Victorian husband had that his wife should be pure and unsullied by any former attachments to anyone else. Also on whether a husband should admit to having been wrong and risk his authority. Things got wound up pretty promptly at the end - it seems as if Trollope were just going through the motions.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kept In The Dark, which could well be subtitled Pride and Procrastination, was written late in Trollope's life. It's the story of a couple who fall in love and marry, but separate as a result of a careless failure of communication. Although it's one of Trollope's shortest books, he still has room to explore thoroughly (as only Trollope can do), the motivations of each spouse, and the pride which prevents them from easily working out what should have been an easy matter. But with Trollope, of course, the beauty is in the details, and here he explores at his usual length the agonies of a guiltless and guileless wife who inexplicably fails to inform her husband of an important incident in her past, and the self-inflicted pain of a decent but pigheaded husband who reacts to his wife's slip-up with more pride than common sense. Trollope does his best to explain how these things could have happened, but I wasn't really convinced. Maybe people behaved differently enough in those days that the sequence of events would have been more credible to readers of that era.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my favorite Trollope, but I just loved the two main characters, Cecelia Holt and George Western, both stern and set in their ways. I also enjoyed the haughty Miss Altifiorla and the scamp Sir Francis Geraldine. Mr. Western's sister Lady Grant is my favorite, so sensible, so kind and caring.

I shall now begin Marion Fay, as I slowly make my way through Trollope's 47 novels!

[Bharathi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Anthony Trollope's books. Even though i did not enjoy the book in the beginning (probably waiting for the axe to fall), it turned out to be quite good as I read it. Ms. Altifurla was delicious. Trollope's understanding of the female psyche is proven once again in this book.

[Laurel Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Psychological study/Cautionary tale/Domestic Dostoevsky.

"You have first to believe the story as I tell it you, and get out of your head altogether the story as you have conceived it."

[Althea Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been intending on reading Trollope for quite some time, and this one won... well, it's short!
This edition is also a direct photostat from the original Victorian serial, which is aesthetically charming, but slightly annoying to read (two columns per page).
My opinion? Well, this is not Great Literature,regardless of the reviews out there that go on about Trollope's 'insight into humanity' in this work, blah, blah, blah. This was written as a serial, and it is very much a soap-opera-esque entertainment. It effectively keeps you on the edge of your seat, going "OMG! What will happen next? Will they reconcile? Can I just strangle her now? Or at least give her a good shake? Can I kick him in the seat of his pants?"
All the characters are bloody idiots, repressive Victorian society or no.
Yet they are compelling.
Our main character, Cecilia, dumps her fiance when she realizes the spark of romance just isn't there. To help her get over it, her mom takes her on a trip. While traveling, she meets a suitable man who's just been dumped by his fiancee. She feels like it would be trying to steal the show (and just awkward) to tell him the story of her prior relationship, so she doesn't. They become friends, and she realizes that this guy actually knows - and despises - her ex. Which makes it even more awkward to tell him about it. Then they get engaged... and married. How can she tell him she was engaged to this man he hates now? But it's impossible that he'll never find out: they move in the same social circles, after all - and Cecilia also has a frenemy who keeps threatening to tell.
Oh, the drama. (It's a lot more complicated; the above paragraph is vastly simplified.) It's not a wholly satisfying novel; Trollope wants to tie everything up neatly, but while Cecilia's dumbassery is something I could have a bit of sympathy for, her husband was really just a jerk who deserved some just desserts.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A woman breaks off her engagement when she discovers her fiancé truly does not love her. Months later, she falls in love with another man and does not tell him that she, at one point, was engaged. I was surprised at the amount of suspense the author built on this simple premise. This story shows how some people can pretend to be your friend to your face and plot for your unhappiness behind the scenes. A very well written classic.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very late Trollope that probably suffered for me because I read it after Miss Mackenzie. He's having a great time in MM introducing new characters, dropping Lady Glencora in, making little authorial proclamations, etc, whereas here at the end it often feels like the world has the minimum number of characters in it to make the story possible to tell. (Worse still, when there are more characters than are necessary, they're indistinguishable from each other—Cecilia's friends, aside from the one who plays a direct role in the story, are interchangeable.)

The story is a Trollope classic—a slightly weak personality making a small mistake that starts rolling downhill—made unusual because the weak personality is a woman instead of a man. But the money transactions of Framley Parsonage, and the reaction to them, feel much more real than the hidden past in Kept in the Dark; it's easy to see why Cecilia holds her story back at the start, but Trollope has trouble explaining why she lets it get out of control.

I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth: I am grateful to Trollope for writing 40-some-odd novels for me personally. This is one of the some-odd, but I'll take it; there are still moments where the conversation escapes the title-drop-filled recapitulations of the plot that are most common here and slips away into Real Trollope Altitudes.

[Pascale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Spun into a novella, this charming but very slight story only works because of Trollope's great skill. Basically, Cecilia makes a mistake in failing to inform her suitor George Western that a little while back, she was engaged to a nasty Baronet whom she had the good sense to ditch before it was too late. When George learns the truth, all hell breaks loose and his sister has to intervene to make him take Cecilia back. A short and breezy read which gives a hint of why Trollope has remained a classic to this day.

[Jae · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was at my little town library where the selection is limited and I almost picked up The Way We Live Now again, because I love it so much, but I opted for a book I hadn't read instead. This is not the masterpiece that TWWLN is, but it was very enjoyable and sad just the same. Another of his books whose underlying theme is the constrained lives of women in that time -- the heroine keeps a secret from her husband, for reasons that seem somewhat natural (although again, influenced by the strictness of her social role and the lack of options available to her) in her position, and then becomes more and more anxious and besieged as the secret is threatened, and finally revealed. There's a happy ending, but for me the book had an overall tone of sadness, basically because Cecilia had to put up with this shit, to put it in terms that Cecilia certainly never heard, much less would use. It's a pretty middling Trollope, but I love Trollope so I enjoyed it. I think I'm going to read the Chronicles of Barsetshire this summer. I read The Warden in college and didn't appreciate it, but I think that was more me (also, seriously, if you're going to introduce 20 y.o.s to Trollope, why pick the Warden? How about the Palliser novels, or The Way We Live Now? I mean, if you're only going to read one novel by Trollope -- which you shouldn't, you should read as many as possible -- it should definitely be The Way We Live Now.) I read The Small House at Allington last year, I think, or the year before,and enjoyed it so I'm going to re-read The Warden and then try thte rest.

[Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Because I love Trollope's work, I'll forgive him for this novel. It's really only a short story--5 pages would do; 92 is way overmuch. Plus, I think it's his last work. The guy was tired.

As always with Trollope, the characters are wonderful. Also, his mores are also consistent with his time, as you might expect. The man was a VIctorian through and through. That means that the idea of complete submission to one's husband today is so very foreign to me, as is the laughability of a woman being independent and speaking out for women's autonomy. However, the characters are consistent with the time and within themselves. You expect there to be a happy ending and that bad people will get theirs. (Sir Geraldine's is coming yet.)

Worth a try, but I'd start with earlier, better crafted Trollopes if you're not familiar with his work. The Barchester Chronicles would be a good intro. A fine writer.

[Eva Wierzuchowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Making a stand.

Or so the frivolous fillies thought at the time. One got her grand cumuppance, and the other, after much soul searching, eventually received her deserts. Maybe not particularly just though. Frankly, I am with Mr Western on this one. He, of all people, should have been told from the outset. About the cowardly woman's previous engagement. She therefore deserved her penance, and rightly was in the wrong. In fact she got away with it admirably.
Meanwhile, there are so many misogynistic comments, littered throughout the book.
Passages like possessing her exclusively as his wife. Keeping her at home as a rare thing of beauty only for his eyes. And so on.
Generally, as a story, it was incredibly repetitive and lent itself as a weekly suplement, rather than a whole book.

[Janice Schulz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trollope is undoubtedly my favorite author and this is one of his lesser-known books. True to his form, Kept in the Dark ends tidily with all misunderstandings corrected and the heroine settling quietly into domestic bliss after learning her lesson. (For something a little different, try Linda Tressel.) Cecilia Holt keeps an intriguing secret from her new husband that threatens to blow her marriage up - and when it comes out in a way contrary to how she would have it revealed, that is just what happens.

[Alethea Hammer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is okay. But it isn't as good as some other Anthony Trollope novels. I didn't find the characters sympathetic and likable. In some of his novels all the characters are likable, even the crooks and thieves. In this one there are four main characters. The two protagonists are both stupid. The other two are shallow and vindictive. The mother was lacking in backbone. The only likable characters were the sister-in-law and the lawyer.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

First Trollope I've read. Enjoyed to an extent. Don't feel drawn to read another in his apparently prolific output. It made me think of the nicely made -- aesthetically pleasing but lightweight two- or three-parter BBC mini series that seem to have been drawn out from short stories. Much ado about little.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the last novel Trollope wrote, and while it is called "a subtle study of a man's jealousy," I thought the story was a bit unrealistic. A wife puts off telling her husband that she had been engaged before they met, and when he learns about it, he walks out on her. It may be a warning about letting things fester between spouses, but the situation seemed strained to modern eyes.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Several of the novels Trollope wrote toward the end of his life are pretty forgettable. This is one of them. I might have given it only one star, but I have to save that rating for The Fixed Period, coming up soon.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of those annoying plot devices where the protagonist has several chances to make a clean breast of the knowledge she possesses, but doesn't take advantage of any of them until the situation grows out of control. Frustrating.

[squed]

wasn't a big fan of this one but the characters' dialogue and letters were extremely well written. miss altifiorla rockets up my list of top 10 fictional characters i want to punch out, even forgetting the fact that she is a woman. leave poor cecilia alone!

[Julie]

Trollope in mini - one main plot line instead of several, but the usual insight into psychology.

[Lauretta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook