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narrative like a large needy reptile.
    Into the action arrives the young heiress Milly Theale, whose history, we are told,
    was a New York history, confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by most accounts, in respect of the mass of money so piled on the girl’s back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and in particular was strange – a combination in itself of a nature to engage Mrs Stringham’s attention.
    Mrs Stringham is, of course, childless, old enough to be Milly’s aunt, and she becomes Milly’s surrogate aunt to match Kate’s aunt in the novel about two women, both orphans, both in the care of their aunts, both moving slowly towards destruction, one of the body, one of the moral spirit.
    This idea of the family as anathema to the novel in the nineteenth century, or the novel as an enactment of the destruction of the family and the rise of the stylish conscience, or the individual spirit, comes in more guises than the replacement of mothers by aunts. As Lionel Trilling has pointed out: ‘Of all the fathers of Jane Austen novels, Sir Thomas [Bertram] is the only one to whom admiration is given.’ This idea of the annihilation of the communal and its replacement with the person, and the novel being one of the agents of this, as much as a result of it, comes throughout the century, however, in the guise of mothers fading and aunts arriving. As Rupert Christiansen has pointed out in The Complete Book of Aunts , it occurs in the novels between Austen and James as much as it does in their work. It occurs in the novels of Dickens ( David Copperfield and Little Dorrit ) and Charlotte Brontë ( Jane Eyre ), of Thackeray ( Vanity Fair ) and Trollope (He Knew He Was Right ).
    But as the century went on, novelists had to contemplate the afterlives of Elizabeth and Darcy, Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram, had to deal with the fact that these novels made familiesout of the very act of breaking them. It was clear that since something fundamental had been done already in the novel to the idea of parents, something would also have to be done to the very idea of marriage itself, since marriage was a dilution of the autonomy of the individual protagonist. There is a line that can be drawn between Trollope and George Eliot and Henry James in which all three dramatize precisely the same scene, each of them alert to its implications. Each of them is alert to the power of the lone, unattached male figure in the novel. This male figure is not openly looking for a wife, and this is what makes him dangerous, more dangerous than any aunt has been. He can have an uneasy sexual presence with a way of noticing and listening. He can have the power of conscience, and the pure strength of someone who does not have obvious desires. He can represent the novelist in the novel, but is also from the future, from a world in which the making of marriages is no longer the main subject for a novelist. Once more, it is his solitude that gives him power, as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice derives his power from his solitude as much as his fortune, until he marries Elizabeth.
    There is a chapter in Trollope’s novel Phineas Finn , published in 1869, called ‘Lady Laura Kennedy’s Headache’, when Laura Kennedy tells Phineas that her marriage has been a mistake. In doing so, she uses his first name, not having done so before, and becomes oddly intimate with him while making clear, as she says, that ‘I have blundered as fools blunder, thinking that I was clever enough to pick my footsteps aright without asking counsel from any one. I have blundered and stumbled and fallen, and now I am so bruised that I am not able to stand upon my feet.’
    As they talk she compares Phineas, who is