Rachel Ray

Anthony Trollope's Rachel Ray (1863) is one of the quiet masterpieces of his standalone fiction — a short, perfectly proportioned comedy of love and narrow faith set in the small Devonshire brewing town of Baslehurst. Rachel Ray lives in a cottage with her timid widowed mother and her stern elder sister, Mrs. Prime, a young widow who has turned grief and self-denial into a joyless creed. Into their shadowed household comes Luke Rowan, a handsome, impetuous young man newly arrived to take his share in the local brewery — and when he and Rachel begin, hesitantly, to fall in love, the whole town has something to say about it.

Mrs. Prime is scandalised that her sister should dance, walk out with a young man, and dream of being happy; to her it looks like worldliness and sin. She is egged on by the zealous Mr. Prong, an Evangelical clergyman courting her with one eye on her small fortune. Around them gathers the whole machinery of provincial opinion — gossiping neighbours, an offended brewer, a contested election, a doubtful rumour about Luke's character — until a girl's simple wish to be loved becomes the business of an entire community.

Famously, the novel was commissioned for a pious Evangelical magazine and then rejected, its editor fearing that Trollope's gentle satire of censorious piety would scandalise his readers. That satire is the heart of the book: an argument, made with warmth and exact social observation, against the kind of religion that mistrusts pleasure and treats happiness as a danger. With his unhurried realism and his intimate, confiding narrative voice, Trollope anatomises a small town's cruelty and kindness, and the narrow choices of a woman with no power of her own — and quietly insists that to love, to marry, and to be happy in this world is no sin.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1863 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.