MY DEAR MADAM,

. . . Is it most expedient for a man to make avowal of his attachment to a lady ‘viva voce’ (`anglice’ in ate a ate) or by epistolary correspondence?

This preface explains the motive of my now addressing you. It will save me the necessity of a more explicit avowal, and declare to you that my future happiness on earth is at your disposal . . .

And so on, for pages and pages of pompous and prosaic guff. Mr Trollope, like Mr Collins, claims to despise those who ‘contract alliances upon motives of a pecuniary nature’, yet his letter goes into both his financial situation and hers in minute detail. Finally he winds up on a note of unconcious irony:

In doing this in the most simple manner, and in rejecting the flippant nonsense which I believe to be commonly used on occasions of this nature, I doubt not I have acted as well in conformity of your sentiments as those of, My Dear Madam,

Your sincere admirer and devoted servant,

Romantic, no? Every line pounding with purple passion? Sadly, the ringing of the off-stage tills, which is the only music to be heard throughout this letter, was the tune to which poor Fanny had to dance all her life. Thos. Anth. proved a poor provider, Fanny a bonny breeder, and his thwarted expectations plus eight children brought the family low.

But it was as Fanny Trollope that she became something she could never have been as Miss Milton, a highly successful writer, traveller and lady of letters. She was famous as far afield as the USA, where her scourging of everything from American table manners to the slave trade brought the revolting natives out to riot in the streets. She also lived to enjoy the success of her even more famous son Anthony, the Barsetshire novelist. And even though superseded by him, Fanny could take comfort in one thought. There would always be one member of the family whose writing she could better — her husband’s!

But of all the proposals of undesirable men, centre stage in the Theatre of Embarrassment must be the wretched heroine of Mary McCarthy’s excruciating story, The Man In The Brooks Brothers Shirt. He is ‘a pink, middle-aged stranger’, a travelling salesman from Cleveland. She is a New Yorker, tripping West and desperately conscious of slumming; smart, yet not so street-smart that she can dodge the inevitable pass when it comes.

They meet on a long-distance Pullman at the start of a three-day journey. Her last memory is of drinking whisky with him in his compartment. When she wakes in the sleeping-berth the next morning, she realizes in a moment of toe-curling horror that he is in there with her, and naked . . .

Waves of shame began to run through her, like savage internal blushes, as fragments of the night before presented themselves for inspection . . . She had fought him off for a long time, but at length her will had softened. She had felt tired and kind, and thought `why not?’ Then there had been something peculiar about the love-making . . . There were (oh, Holy Virgin!) four-letter words that she had been forced to repeat, and, at the climax, a rain of blows on her buttocks that must surely (dear God.) have left bruises . . . If only nobody could know.

Feverishly she tries to get dressed and leave without waking him. She is sick with disgust, and her feelings are vividly real. It seems like the most horripilating act of sexual congress you can imagine, as if King Kong had forced himself upon Fay Wray. Of course, he wakes up. She wants to go, but he won’t let her:

The man seized her arms and pulled her down, sitting up himself beside her. He looked very fat, and the hairs on his chest were grey.

`You can’t go,’ he said, quite simply and naturally, but as if he had been thinking about it all night long. ‘I love you. I’m crazy about you. This is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me. You come to San Francisco with me and we’ll go to Monterey, and I’ll fix it with Leonie to get a divorce . .

She stared at him incredulously, but there was no doubt of it: he was serious. He wanted to marry her. ‘Kiss me,’ he said, but she pulled away.

And then in one short line she speaks for all the women who have ever suffered the attentions of selfish, brutal, stupid, repulsive, and above all self-satisfied men:

`I have to throw up,’ she said. And she does!

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