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The Rector's Wife

By: Joanna Trollope
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Black Swan
ISBN: 0552994707
ISBN-13: 9780552994705
Released: 02 Jul 1992
RRP: £7.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Compelling - By: A. Bittan, 07 Apr 2008
I borrowed this book from my wife, & it's the first Joanna Trollope book I have read. Trollope writes very well & I soon found I couldn't put the book down. The characters reallly come alive & the picture of church & village life is realistic & compelling, although the ending was a slight anti-climax.

My one concern is that it's alll frightfully upper middle class; people "lower in the social scale" appear in this book only as shalllow caricatures of "ordinary folk".

That said, I will certainly read more of Joanna Trollope.
Disappointing - By: , 18 Oct 2002
I was a bit disappointed by this book. I have read several of Joanna Trollope's novels & reallly enjoyed them (Marrying the Mistress, the Best of Friends, A Spanish Lover to name a few), but I felt let down by the Rector's Wife. What I like about Joanna Trollope especiallly is her attention to detail, her observation of human characteristics, the way people talk, interact with each other etc but in this book I didn't find so much of this. To be honest I found the descriptions of the church & people related with it tiresome, & I had difficulty remembering who the subsidiary characters were, which isn't usuallly a problem. Also the main characters seemed somehow colourless. Nevertheless, it was, like her other books, an easy read & it did improve towards the end.
The Rector's Wife - a surprising find - By: Miss C Tarbett, 03 Jul 2002
Not having read Joanna Trollope before, I borrowed The Rector's Wife from my mother & started reading it with some scepticism. A chapter in & I reallly was surprised how engaging this book is & not because, as I expected, it is full of self-pity & romance. Rather it deals with the complex & conflicting issues of religion, duty, love & passion with such sensitivity that I now understand how rewarding & yet stifling a life devoted to the church must be for thousands of women alll over the world.

The book takes a sometimes uncomfortable look at the reality of living the life of a church wife - the expectations of a needy & judgemental parish, the frustration of putting your own needs & ambitions aside to make way for your husband's & what happens when you suddenly realise you've made a terrible mistake & you want your life back.

A reallly thoughtfully written book which I couldn't put down.

brilliant - By: , 06 Nov 2001
i reallly enjoyed this book you never would have guessed this would end like it did. i found myself picking it up & putting it back down. Anna is a reallly loyal woman to her husband & children but she meets three men & that soon changes.

you won't be able to put this book down after this book read the men & the girls this book is just as good.

It's like making new friends whose lives you'll never forget - By: , 04 Mar 2001
The Rectors wife is about exactly that, a rectors wife. A potentiallly very boring character which, in the book is anything but. Trollope has a way of developing a character that seems efortless but that manages to imbed itslef in your mind in the same way meeting new people in real life would. So you find yourself telling your friends stories about a friend you know who did so & so only to remember as you are telling the story that you never had a friend like that, that it was actuallly a character in a book you read that did alll these things you remember, but that the story is so vivid in your memory stll & that the character & events were so plausible that you could just as easily have known someone like that in real life.

Even more appealing is that those very believable women which Trollope creates are so normal yet so very powerful at the same time, & often in a way that they are not aware of themselves in the book as the story unfolds. They never see themselves as powerful. They are inspiring in their being feminist without trying to be feminist or setting out to do anything remotely feminist. Their actions seem to be motivated by a sort of natural self respect & innate wisdom. It's as if Trollope is saying they are female so they are powerful as opposed to they are feminist therefore they are powerful. You wish alll women would have their self respect & their intuition guide their decisions instead of the modern superwoman's feminist manifesto you see in so many of the new & sudden avalanche of bright coloured, big lettered, female-authored, fmcb (fast moving consumer books)lining up the wallls of every book shop & supermarket there is. Trollope's women are often not trying to prove anything to anyone. You feel like you are just reading about someone who is just trying to live her life, who is just trying to make this puzzle work, like the rest of us, & that she is totallly unaware of the fact that her life is being read in a book by someone in very big pyjamas under their duvet. You can very easily imagine a Trueman Show scenario where one of these women would one day look up & realise there's someone else out there watching her, & that she lives in a book & that her life is nothing but a story invented by a very creative mind. And you are the curious giant looking down at her. That's the appeal of Trollope's books for me, is that these people's lives are not perfect but they work. They somehow are ok eventuallly & in totallly believable ways. It's like there is a Trollope philosophy: that shit happens, life doesn't turn out the way you want it to, but it's ok because, unlike fiction, real life (most days) doesn't involve that much drama, & because at the end of the day, & for as long as we can compromise, which we can, there are no real big regrets in life.