The Warden

I loved the first 50 pages of this book. They were brilliantly sharp and dry and laid out a situation for which a novel would never be written this century: a scandal of entitlement among local clergy in a small town in England. There were no women. (Why is it that I, a modern feminist, am most drawn to novels by the most committed misogynists? Is it their bitterness that I like? Or their complete lack of interest in the traditional love story?) But then it felt like Trollope just lost interest and kept writing the last 150 pages on autopilot. They served more to close out the wonderful opening than as a middle and end of a novel worth reading.