I am the anti!Dani. For years I resisted reading Trollope because I found the Barchester novels so dull. Then a friend said "Try The Eustace Diamonds. It's all about Sin In High Life." I did, and I was hooked.

Trollope understands women and outsiders deeply. And he explains them to you. It is fascinating to listen to him explain what a mortal insult it is to accuse a man of lying, and precisely how close you can get to that line without saying something unforgivable.

And Betsy makes a liar out of me by reminding me that I did enjoy The Eustace Diamonds, mostly because of Lady Eustace.

Also, I wore cutoffs over tights with cowboy boots (?!&$!) in university. The only excuses I can offer are that it was the late 80's, and I lived in a cold climate. It was apparently very important to us to extend the shorts-wearing season.

Lady Eustace is a fine, fine character.

Hey, I wore legwarmers with skirts in the '80s. If you'd been in Hanover, New Hampshire going to a job interview in midwinter, so would you.

I'm presuming Teppy found it, but for folks looking for a direct link to vintage Wonder Woman (in all her kinky bondage glory): Wonder Woman Archives starts here with vol. 1.

I'm presuming Teppy found it

You betcha. But then the price made me quail. I'm hoping for a Christmas bonus at work, because nothing would make me happier than to spend money from the fundies on buying kink.

Eleanor Butler

See, I knew about the "Betsy Bell and Mary Grey" song version, but that was a much earlier couple, who both died of plague.

But Lady Eleanor Butler - what comes up in my admittedly creaky memory is the name of woman who was the subject of Titulus Regis - the document that made the Two Princes in the Tower illegitimate, because it turned out their hornytoad hounddog daddy had gone through a ceremony of marriage with one Lady Eleanor Butler, who was then shoved in a convent so he could marry someone else.

Another famous Eleanor Butler. How cool is that?

I love to do that. My uptight Catholic relatives bought me "The Joy of Writing Sex" and "How to Write a Dirty Story" last Xmas. And they don't know it, but they used to buy my bus tickets when I fornicated out of town.

a direct link to vintage Wonder Woman (in all her kinky bondage glory)

Neal Pollack on Wonder Woman (so to speak): "[N]othing, and I mean nothing, gets me hotter than when a so-called 'ordinary' woman changes into a superheroine."

Jesus Christ! Shorts over tights?

It was the '70s.

That look was still fashionable in the early 90s. Or rather, since that's what I wore in sixth grade, it was probably desperately unfashionable, but I'm sure I saw it somewhere and loved the look. Ooh, I bet I got it from Blossom, source of many of my middle-school sartorial travesties.

Please tell me Trollope stops trying to write about The Perfect Man. He is much better writing about people he doesn't approve of.

I never really mind his perfect people; first, because there aren't really that many perfect people in his novels, and second, because the few there are seem so painfully aware of their niceness and how badly it hampers them. The stalwart and often-spurned noble young man of Can You Forgive Her? is indeed stalwart and patient and virtuous, but also often sadly resigned to being spurned and having to wait for the heroine to get her head out of her ass. He's not flashy or gaudy or dangerous, and he knows it, and he's patient under the burden of his own niceness, but also a little galled and quietly frustrated by it.

And Planty Pall in the last of the Palliser novels unexpectedly and quietly broke my heart.

And now that I think of it--dammit, here I am desperately wanting to reread the Phineas Finn novels, and all my Trollopes are packed up in my dad's closet owing to insufficient space in the San Francisco apartment.