There’s a way in which the Victorians were monsters. (Except for the end of Mansfield Park.) Other awesome nineteenth century novelists without Trollope’s problems are Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot, neither of whom I read until after I’d written Tooth and Claw, but honestly, try them. Austen didn’t have any of the problems Trollope did. This makes me sad, because it shows how limited their reading of nineteenth century fiction is. Some people have compared Tooth and Claw to Jane Austen. I read about thirty Trollope novels as I was writing it. I don’t have the exact record of how many writing days I put in on T&C, but I started it in June of 2002 and finished it on January 16th 2003.
Then I sat down and wrote the first chapter. I made dinner and got all the worldbuilding sorted in my head.I decided to steal the plot of Framley Parsonage, rather than The Small House At Allington, because I’d finished Framley Parsonage and could see how to make the whole thing work better, with dragons. They could need to eat each other to get bigger - the perils of consumption! I started to giggle. They could be bound by biological imperatives to behave like people in a sentimental Victorian novel. But dragons… dragons could be just like that. “Trollope doesn’t understand… dragons?” And in that moment I had the great revelation that is Tooth and Claw, that Trollope understands dragons perfectly, and it’s only when he tries to write about human beings (and especially women) that the books lose psychological realism. “Pretty good, but it doesn’t really understand dragons,” I said. Not sorry to have a break from Trollope, I started to read it immediately, so when Emmet came home I was immersed in it. The book was Ursula Le Guin’s The Other Wind. Sometime during the day, the library called and said they had a book for me, so I went to pick it up. Now The Small House in Allington is about Lily Dale, and all of Trollope’s weird fixations about women are in fine display in that book. When my husband went to work, I was reading The Small House in Allington.
I had the idea for it all in a flash one day.
If that sounds appealing, you’ll like it. It’s a sentimental Victorian novel in which all the characters are dragons who eat each other. Tooth and Claw is the easiest of my books to summarize.
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