Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope lands the line like a pin in a balloon: the Victorian romance depends on selective ignorance. "I doubt" is the genteel lubricant here, a polite preface that lets him deliver something essentially ungentlemanly. He isn’t merely teasing men as oafs or women as fragile idealists; he’s diagnosing courtship as a managed performance in which desire is sustained by strategic opacity.

The bite is in "the whole of it". Not the lover's character, or his history, but his mind: the running private feed of petty impulses, vanities, resentments, lusts, boredom. Trollope implies that intimacy, taken to its logical extreme, is corrosive. The beloved is tolerable as a curated text, not as an unedited draft. That is a sharp rebuke to the era's moral pageantry, when novels, sermons, and social rules insisted that the right match could align virtue with passion. Trollope, ever the realist of drawing rooms and inheritance plots, knows better. People marry into property, status, timing, habit; they fall in love with a version.

The gendered framing matters. He chooses "any girl", not "any person", because Victorian women were trained to treat love as destiny and men as moral projects. The line punctures that training: if you actually saw what you're signing up to redeem, you'd hesitate. Read now, it feels uncomfortably modern, less about women being naive than about how everyone survives romance by not demanding total transparency. Total knowledge isn't intimacy; it's an audit.