Note on Lily Dale (The Small House at Allington by Trollope)

In some of the reviews I read of The Small House at Allington people expressed a dislike for the Lily Dale character forgetting that sudden falling in love had the character of a religious conversion for a virginal young girl of barely 20. It was and still is for some an abyss of abandonment and of total surrender spiritual and physical. One thinks of Natasha and Kitty in the novels of Tolstoy. Where is the book entitled Literary Blackguards of the 19th. Century? The irritation with Lilly is generated out of an impatience with her declining to ‘move on’. Her family expresses that very same attitude but such betrayals take years out of a person’s life. By the time she is 25 and has dandled a couple of Bell’s babies enough healing will have taken place for her to come back to life again.