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Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories
The tales in this collection, as with those of Tales of All Countries , encompass a variety of themes and are set in a number of different lands. Lotta Schmidt herself is an attractive young woman of Vienna, whose heart is melted by the sensitive zither-playing of her admirer Herr Crippel. The two generals, in the story of that name, are soldiers on opposing sides in the American Civil War. Father Giles of Ballymoy is an hospitable Irish priest whose strange ways are at first misinterpreted by an English visitor, and Miss Ophelia Gledd has two suitors, one American and one English, both of whom are representatives of all their fellow countrymen.
403 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1867
About the author
Anthony Trollope
2,521 books1,800 followersAnthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day.
Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_...
Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_...
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 7, 2017
My first Trollope short story collection and I enjoyed it almost as much as his novels. These stories take place in several different countries - Trollope was very well-traveled. As with most of Trollope, there is more than a grain of romance - more so than his novels which go far beyond just a romance.
The title story involves a young woman who is wooed by a man many years her senior, but she hopes to catch a younger husband. Or does she? Maybe she is just playing hard to get. Another favorite is Malachi's Cove which might be predictable, but has an unusual setting. The young woman is engaged in the collecting of seaweed for fertilizer. A competition develops from the son of a farmer to whom she sells - the farmer has decided her price is too high. It was made into a 1973 film.
I also liked The Last Austrian Who Left Venice. Italy became a country in 1867, combining many city states, but not until after it loosed its chains of Austria in 1866. As this collection was published in 1868, the setting was quite interesting to me. The romance this time is between an Italian girl and an Austrian. Miss Ophelia Gledd was fun because, though written in the 3rd person, it was almost obvious that the narrator was an admirer of Miss Gledd. Yet, are we sure about the admirer part? Miss Ophelia Gledd was a young lady of Boston, Massachussetts, and I should be glad to know whether in the estimation of my countrymen and countrywomen she is to be esteemed a lady. There is enough subdued Trollope humor in this to satisfy any Trollope enthusiast.
The collection includes nine stories in all, and not a stinker among them. I am no longer the best judge of whether this is good or not-so-good Trollope, but I enjoyed it. Leaving room for the best of his best, I'll give this just 4 stars.
The title story involves a young woman who is wooed by a man many years her senior, but she hopes to catch a younger husband. Or does she? Maybe she is just playing hard to get. Another favorite is Malachi's Cove which might be predictable, but has an unusual setting. The young woman is engaged in the collecting of seaweed for fertilizer. A competition develops from the son of a farmer to whom she sells - the farmer has decided her price is too high. It was made into a 1973 film.
I also liked The Last Austrian Who Left Venice. Italy became a country in 1867, combining many city states, but not until after it loosed its chains of Austria in 1866. As this collection was published in 1868, the setting was quite interesting to me. The romance this time is between an Italian girl and an Austrian. Miss Ophelia Gledd was fun because, though written in the 3rd person, it was almost obvious that the narrator was an admirer of Miss Gledd. Yet, are we sure about the admirer part? Miss Ophelia Gledd was a young lady of Boston, Massachussetts, and I should be glad to know whether in the estimation of my countrymen and countrywomen she is to be esteemed a lady. There is enough subdued Trollope humor in this to satisfy any Trollope enthusiast.
The collection includes nine stories in all, and not a stinker among them. I am no longer the best judge of whether this is good or not-so-good Trollope, but I enjoyed it. Leaving room for the best of his best, I'll give this just 4 stars.
December 25, 2023
Trollope is not a short story writer—and really [what I love about] Victorian fiction just doesn't seem well suited to the format, though I'm sure there are a million exceptions—but... well, I love Trollope and I'm going to read everything. I think these would probably be more fun to read in context, just going through old Victorian magazines and newspapers, but I'm not that kind of sicko right now because I have too many kids (>0) to spend entire days at the university library.
LOTTA SCHMIDT: Trollope's stories frequently feel like notebook-emptiers from all his trips abroad—very few of them are set in England. Lotta Schmidt is an Austrian maiden who has to choose between an ugly and aging musician and an age-appropriate dandy. It's about how incredibly sexy the zither is.
THE ADVENTURES OF FRED PICKERING: One of Trollope's best stories. Fred Pickering marries rashly, quits his job, becomes a writer, and becomes convinced that his only problem is that other people unfairly fail to recognize his talent. He gets helped multiple times by older writers and gets mad that they aren't helping him more. Kind of a horror story! Lots of Twitter accounts like this.
Trollope, apropos of nothing, was a successful middle-aged bureaucrat before his novels finally sold enough to pay back their advances, and didn't quit his job for years after that.
THE TWO GENERALS: Going to be honest, I skipped this one... tough enough reading all this stuff set outside England, I'm definitely not going to America.
FATHER GILES OF BALLYMOY: Archie Green—a headstrong but likable unmarried Englishman working in Ireland, again probably nothing biographical here—appears in one of my favorite Trollope stories, but this one is just barely an anecdote. What you thought was the inciting moment turns out to be the whole story.
MALACHI'S COVE: The frame of reference most of us have for stories of this type is English textbook fiction—"The Lady or the Tiger," "The Interlopers," etc. "Malachi's Cove" is a workmanlike example, with the intense atmosphere and the strange characters and the heavy setup and twist. I enjoyed it! If we're still making that kind of textbook, and I hope we are, someone should work this one in.
THE WIDOW'S MITE: A sweet Christmasy story that is lacking one more incident to keep the characters from repeating each other in the middle. Englishmen and Americans and the meaning of charity.
THE LAST AUSTRIAN WHO LEFT VENICE: Like Trollope's other European stories, it's probably hard to completely understand the appeal of this 150 years on—these read like they were designed as travelogues as much as they were fiction. The story part of this one operates along the same lines as "Malachi's Cove," but less successfully.
MISS OPHELIA GLEDD: Another excellent story with a great half-involved narrator of the Nick Carraway variety. The title could fit better into the Trollope canon (alongside Can You Forgive Her?) if you called it "Is She A Lady?", which is the question Trollope is asking here. (Ophelia is a beautiful, outspoken American of perfectly good birth who wonders for reasons that become apparent whether she would be received as a lady in England.)
THE JOURNEY TO PANAMA: Really strong melodrama. This is a story that takes for granted a sort of common knowledge about what happens on a long trip abroad—who you meet on board, how relationships develop, which Victorian-lifestyle rules are and aren't temporarily suspended on the ship, what happens when you arrive—and it could have ended up completely incomprehensible for people born after the jet engine was invented. Happily, I think it's more interesting now than it would have been then—it gives you everything you'll need of life on ship to understand the story, so that it works as history and as melodrama.
LOTTA SCHMIDT: Trollope's stories frequently feel like notebook-emptiers from all his trips abroad—very few of them are set in England. Lotta Schmidt is an Austrian maiden who has to choose between an ugly and aging musician and an age-appropriate dandy. It's about how incredibly sexy the zither is.
THE ADVENTURES OF FRED PICKERING: One of Trollope's best stories. Fred Pickering marries rashly, quits his job, becomes a writer, and becomes convinced that his only problem is that other people unfairly fail to recognize his talent. He gets helped multiple times by older writers and gets mad that they aren't helping him more. Kind of a horror story! Lots of Twitter accounts like this.
Trollope, apropos of nothing, was a successful middle-aged bureaucrat before his novels finally sold enough to pay back their advances, and didn't quit his job for years after that.
THE TWO GENERALS: Going to be honest, I skipped this one... tough enough reading all this stuff set outside England, I'm definitely not going to America.
FATHER GILES OF BALLYMOY: Archie Green—a headstrong but likable unmarried Englishman working in Ireland, again probably nothing biographical here—appears in one of my favorite Trollope stories, but this one is just barely an anecdote. What you thought was the inciting moment turns out to be the whole story.
MALACHI'S COVE: The frame of reference most of us have for stories of this type is English textbook fiction—"The Lady or the Tiger," "The Interlopers," etc. "Malachi's Cove" is a workmanlike example, with the intense atmosphere and the strange characters and the heavy setup and twist. I enjoyed it! If we're still making that kind of textbook, and I hope we are, someone should work this one in.
THE WIDOW'S MITE: A sweet Christmasy story that is lacking one more incident to keep the characters from repeating each other in the middle. Englishmen and Americans and the meaning of charity.
THE LAST AUSTRIAN WHO LEFT VENICE: Like Trollope's other European stories, it's probably hard to completely understand the appeal of this 150 years on—these read like they were designed as travelogues as much as they were fiction. The story part of this one operates along the same lines as "Malachi's Cove," but less successfully.
MISS OPHELIA GLEDD: Another excellent story with a great half-involved narrator of the Nick Carraway variety. The title could fit better into the Trollope canon (alongside Can You Forgive Her?) if you called it "Is She A Lady?", which is the question Trollope is asking here. (Ophelia is a beautiful, outspoken American of perfectly good birth who wonders for reasons that become apparent whether she would be received as a lady in England.)
THE JOURNEY TO PANAMA: Really strong melodrama. This is a story that takes for granted a sort of common knowledge about what happens on a long trip abroad—who you meet on board, how relationships develop, which Victorian-lifestyle rules are and aren't temporarily suspended on the ship, what happens when you arrive—and it could have ended up completely incomprehensible for people born after the jet engine was invented. Happily, I think it's more interesting now than it would have been then—it gives you everything you'll need of life on ship to understand the story, so that it works as history and as melodrama.
April 30, 2017
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) was a very successful English author. He published 47 novels and 12 books of short stories. Lotta Shmidt was published in 1867. It contains nine short tales, each about a dozen pages. Each story is composed in delightful prose in Trollope’s unique felicitous somewhat subtle humorous style.
The plots of the nine tales are (these are not the titles):
How and why a young woman chose an older man as her husband.
A man gives up his lucrative job as a lawyer to become a writer.
Two brothers, both vying for the same girl, take opposite sides in the American Civil War.
What happened to a man who tossed a priest down stairs?
A very poor not beautiful girl saves a young man
A woman gives up her wedding gown to starving people.
A man and woman on two sides of enemies are in love.
An American woman is afraid to marry an Englishman because customs in England are so different than in the US.
Is what is happening a budding romance on board a ship?
The plots of the nine tales are (these are not the titles):
How and why a young woman chose an older man as her husband.
A man gives up his lucrative job as a lawyer to become a writer.
Two brothers, both vying for the same girl, take opposite sides in the American Civil War.
What happened to a man who tossed a priest down stairs?
A very poor not beautiful girl saves a young man
A woman gives up her wedding gown to starving people.
A man and woman on two sides of enemies are in love.
An American woman is afraid to marry an Englishman because customs in England are so different than in the US.
Is what is happening a budding romance on board a ship?
August 3, 2025
Trollope's ‘Lotte Schmidt and Other Stories’(1867) is slightly different from some of his other novels and short stories. ‘Lotte Schmidt and Other Stories’ is, for the most part, concerned with boy-girl romance in various settings and situations. The ‘boy’ may be a middle-aged man, a widower, or a foolish youth. The setting may be the time of the Civil War in America, or it might be Boston, Vienna or Venice, a ship from Southampton to Panama, or a small hamlet in the Wild West of Ireland. All of them illustrate just how well Trollope knew these places at first hand, his mother having moved to the United States for some time. His brother's wife was also brought up in the United States. Trollope himself was apprenticed and worked in Europe for many years before his appointment as a clerk in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs in Britain, where his postings included Ireland and Scotland, the Caribbean, Australia and Egypt. The stories in ‘Lotta Schmidt’ thus take us around a wide swathe of the world.
If there is romance in these stories, there is also that sombre streak of realism which is the hallmark of all of Trollope's work. Nowhere is this more sadly seen than in ‘The Misfortunes Of Frederic Pickering.’ Maybe it should have been named the Misfortunes of Mrs Pickering, who bore those of her husband so valiantly. Elsewhere the brutalities of war are dealt with, as are the griefs of an old musician watching the gladness in the eyes of the woman he loves dancing in the arms of a younger, more dashing and much better dancer than himself.
‘Miss Ophelia Gledd’ raises the question of her social acceptability as the wife of an English gentleman moving in the best circles. The issue is really whether she is, indeed, in love with the man who takes her to England, or whether she leaves her heart behind in the possession of a young Bostonian.
The other stories are happy romances. ‘The Journey to Panama’ is of a shipboard acquaintanceship, slightly risqué but perfectly conventional. Only its ending betrays the underlying reality of the situation.
‘Father Giles Of Ballymoy,’ which gives full rein to Trollope's sense of humour and his deep affection for the Irish and Ireland, is the only exception to romance, but then it speaks of a lifelong friendship between an English Protestant gentleman who is a representative of the English Government, and a poor Irish Catholic priest.
If there is romance in these stories, there is also that sombre streak of realism which is the hallmark of all of Trollope's work. Nowhere is this more sadly seen than in ‘The Misfortunes Of Frederic Pickering.’ Maybe it should have been named the Misfortunes of Mrs Pickering, who bore those of her husband so valiantly. Elsewhere the brutalities of war are dealt with, as are the griefs of an old musician watching the gladness in the eyes of the woman he loves dancing in the arms of a younger, more dashing and much better dancer than himself.
‘Miss Ophelia Gledd’ raises the question of her social acceptability as the wife of an English gentleman moving in the best circles. The issue is really whether she is, indeed, in love with the man who takes her to England, or whether she leaves her heart behind in the possession of a young Bostonian.
The other stories are happy romances. ‘The Journey to Panama’ is of a shipboard acquaintanceship, slightly risqué but perfectly conventional. Only its ending betrays the underlying reality of the situation.
‘Father Giles Of Ballymoy,’ which gives full rein to Trollope's sense of humour and his deep affection for the Irish and Ireland, is the only exception to romance, but then it speaks of a lifelong friendship between an English Protestant gentleman who is a representative of the English Government, and a poor Irish Catholic priest.
August 28, 2020
Trollope is concerned in this collection of 1867 short stories with the embarrassments of cross-cultural encounter. His theme in two, 'The Widow's Mite' and 'Miss Ophelia Gledd', is the wooing or engagement of a woman, either English or American, by a partner of the other nationality. The American will never yield on point of principle; and American women fear they will be at sea in a world of minute social gradations of which they know nothing, and will attract adverse judgment for this. Writing during the American Civil War, Trollope is even-handed in stating the best of the motivations of the two sides. 'The Widow's Mite' also illustrates the plight of northern weavers immiserated for the absence of cotton. He states that the South is overwhelmed in terms of numbers, but has shown by far the more brilliant generalship and sheer courage.
In 'The Two Generals', two brothers of a Kentucky lawmaker find themselves on the opposite sides of the war. The more self-righteous, stern one spares the life of the other and yields to him the woman, a family ward, they both love. 'Malachi's Cove' is an adventure story set among barely literate tidecombers of remote Cornwall coves. 'The Adventures of Fred Pickering' could go into Trollope's earlier collection 'An Editor's Tales' in recounting the defeats of an aspirant man of letters unwilling to start at the bottom. The cultural misunderstandings of 'The Last Austrian who Left Venice' are again set in the context of wooing, and show an Austrian fortifications engineer, a Venetian lawyer brother-in-law and his sister all behaving creditably, while 'Father Giles of Ballymoy' points a kind of self-satire at Trollope's English peremptoriness and short temper in Ireland.
Trollope's persona in speaking of attractive young woman is now that of a kindly older man whose tendresses are not threatening. This makes possible a range of ironies, but is different from the perspective of a participant. The collection is interesting, but really for the Trollope completist or student of 1860s intellectual or cultural history.
In 'The Two Generals', two brothers of a Kentucky lawmaker find themselves on the opposite sides of the war. The more self-righteous, stern one spares the life of the other and yields to him the woman, a family ward, they both love. 'Malachi's Cove' is an adventure story set among barely literate tidecombers of remote Cornwall coves. 'The Adventures of Fred Pickering' could go into Trollope's earlier collection 'An Editor's Tales' in recounting the defeats of an aspirant man of letters unwilling to start at the bottom. The cultural misunderstandings of 'The Last Austrian who Left Venice' are again set in the context of wooing, and show an Austrian fortifications engineer, a Venetian lawyer brother-in-law and his sister all behaving creditably, while 'Father Giles of Ballymoy' points a kind of self-satire at Trollope's English peremptoriness and short temper in Ireland.
Trollope's persona in speaking of attractive young woman is now that of a kindly older man whose tendresses are not threatening. This makes possible a range of ironies, but is different from the perspective of a participant. The collection is interesting, but really for the Trollope completist or student of 1860s intellectual or cultural history.
August 28, 2022
I stalled a little on making my way through the Palliser novels, and so I decided to take a side road and read this, my first, collection of Trollope short stories. I really enjoyed it. I haven't read as much Trollope as many, but so far I like his more economical works, where he has to get the job done sufficiently. In this collection, I thought that Father Giles of Ballymoy, Malachi's Cove, and The Widow's Mite were especially well done, with themes of forgiveness, self-revelation, and guilt. The ones that I didn't like as much went by so quickly that I was still able to receive and enjoy his warm voice and then they were wrapped up. My initial hypothesis is that his short stores are underrated by many. I just started another collection, An Editor's Tales, to see what it is like.
September 19, 2018
I enjoyed this selection of Trollope's stories. I can't really understand why he has been so ignored in recent years, as he writes entertainingly and powerfully. Father Giles of Ballymoy was good fun, and I think the ending of The Voyage to Panama will linger with me a long time. I must read more of his output, starting with the other volume of his short stories given to me by a friend.
Want to Read
May 16, 2021The Last Austrian Who Left Venice
July 21, 2021
I have only read 'Malachi's Cove' in preparation for a Trollope Society event.
The Cornish setting was very strong, and I am glad that Mally didn't have to suffer under unjust suspicion for long.
The Cornish setting was very strong, and I am glad that Mally didn't have to suffer under unjust suspicion for long.
May 8, 2025
Standouts for me were 'Malachi's Cove', 'Father Giles' and 'The Journey to Panama'. With the exception of 'Lotta Schmidt', the remaining stories felt a bit lacklustre.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews