| Popis: |
In The Vicar of Wrexhill, Frances Trollope offers a rollicking, irreverent, and satiric portrayal of a charity bazaar, centering on a duplicitous evangelical vicar who preys on vulnerable women. Frances’s bazaar exposes the vile deceit of her villain. Yet her condemnation of his untruthfulness redounds as critics of the novel accuse her of inaccuracy, exaggeration, and deceit. Nearly thirty years later, Anthony drew upon and revised his mother’s depiction of a bazaar in Miss Mackenzie. Like his mother, he mocked the saleswomen, the social jockeying, the entire chaos of the occasion. Seeing Anthony’s depiction in light of Frances’s fictional charity bazaar illuminates an entanglement of altruism and greed, profit and charity, and, notably, deception and truth. At key moments when the two novels intersect, they echo and amplify one another, suggesting that truth and falsehood are nuanced and complex, and that an author’s manner of negotiating them aligns with the attributes and methods of the typical bazaar woman. |
