He Knew He Was Right

Anthony Trollope's story of one man's obsessive self-deception pitted against against the enduring power of his wife's love, "He Knew He Was Right" is edited with an introduction by Frank Kermode in "Penguin Classics". On a visit to the Mandarin Islands, Louis Trevelyan falls in love with Emily, the daughter of the governor, and they are swiftly married and return to live in London. But when a friend of Emily's father - the meddlesome libertine Colonel Osborne - starts paying rather too much attention to the young woman, Louis is consumed by jealousy and refuses to listen to his wife's pleas of innocence. And as his suspicions become increasingly obsessive and the marriage collapses, Louis finds himself driven to desperate actions. In "He Knew He Was Right", Trollope created a highly sympathetic portrait of a deeply troubled marriage, and a compelling psychological story of sexual obsession in his portrait of a nineteenth-century Othello. In his introduction, Frank Kermode discusses Victorian attitudes to courtship and marriage, compares the novel to "Othello" and places it in the context of Trollope's other works.