“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a computer, needs to spend less screen time.”

Excuse me, Jane Austen. I NEED TO BREAK UP WITH THE INTERNET.

And so I curled up in a cozy chair with a neglected Trollope novel, The Bertrams.

I’m not sure anyone reads The Bertrams anymore, but I can testify that Trollope is very popular in the twenty-first century. I joined a Trollope Yahoo group in the early 2000s, and there must have been a hundred fans.

Two of Trollope’s series, The Pallisers and the Barsetshire books, are considered his masterpieces . I prefer two of his other stunning novels, He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now.

And The Bertrams, a splendid, often sad novel about love, rivalry, and work, is one of his better books. Sadly, it is out of print. That is inexplicable to me. It must have to do with Trollope’s reputation as a middlebrow writer. And so readers assume that only the famous books are worth reading, or that Trollope is a mere storyteller – and to an extent I agree with that – but this smoothly-written minor classic explores perennial human struggles: work undertaken out of need rather than liking, lovers’ break-ups over quarrels rooted in finance, and incompatibility in marriage.

An alternate title for the book could be Friends and Rivals.

In the beginning of The Bertrams, Trollope sketches the youthful education of two friends and rivals, George Bertram, whose spendthrift father dumped him in England while his rich uncle pays his school fees, and Arthur Wilkinson, a hard-working boy whose clergyman father struggles to pay tuition.

Their educations are identical but the results divide them. At school Arthur works persistently, but George wins the scholarship to Oxford. At Oxford Arthur works hard for two years, while George appears to do nothing for three. Trollope writes, “It had always been George’s delight to study in such a manner that men should think he did not study.” And so George gets a first in classics, while Arthur is crushed to get a second.

This rivalry, however, ends after graduation. George and Arthur have much in common: both are scholars, and both are religious. Surprisingly, it is brilliant George, not Arthur, who wants to be a clergyman. Arthur, a fellow at Oxford, becomes a vicar only after his father dies, because he must support his mother and sisters. And his life is miserable. His mother is domineering: the church was given to Arthur on the condition that most of the salary go to his mother.

But George wants to be a vicar. He would have loved Arthur’s job. He travels to the Holy Land, and has many mystical experiences. But he also meets a beautiful, cold young woman, Caroline, his uncle’s granddaughter. She has a lot of money, and is extremely materialistic. They fall in love, but she is callous: she selfishly admits she will not marry him if he goes into the church. And so he decides to study law, which bores him and whose practice often seems unjust to him.

And this issue of having the wrong job rings very true. How many people end up working in banks or insurance (T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens? It didn’t bother them), teaching (most high school teachers quit after five years), or working in an office or a restaurant (everybody at some time or another).

Trollope also describes the friendship of two women, which parallels that of the two men. Caroline and Adela are close friends but opposites in every respect: Caroline is obsessed with finance and insists on postponing her marriage to George for three years so he can get established; the time period is too long, and the two quarrel and break up. Adela is spiritual rather than materialistic, and is scandalized by Caroline’s treatment of George. Adela is in love with Arthur, who cannot afford to marry and does not seem keen on Adela anyway. (He is not a romantic figure.)

These are some gritty issue here. And of course the reader wonders if the lovers will ever get together. Always we wonder this in Trollope’s books. But this is no Can You Forgive Her? or The Way We Live Now. Still, it is long and beautifully-written, and if you want to get off the internet, it will entertain you for hours.