SOURCE: Harris, Michael. “Comedy and Romance as a Happy Couple.” Los Angeles Times (3 March 1997): E3.

In the following review, Harris offers a mixed assessment of Trollope's combination of romance and domestic comedy in A Spanish Lover.

The cliché about the English is that they are good at compromising, at muddling through. This may or may not be true in general, but Joanna Trollope's A Spanish Lover suggests that it has some relevance to literature. In most American novelists' hands, the romance and the domestic comedy are separate genres, even antagonistic ones; but Trollope manages to combine them.

She does this by having twin sisters follow divergent paths. Lizzie Middleton has a husband, four children, a thriving art gallery business in Bath and a splendid 18th century house, the Grange. She believes in “being fulfilled. Using all the capacities you have, emotional, physical, mental. Filling yourself up.” And by...