Can you help me identify this novel?

i am desperate to remember a victorian i have recently read. i remember the plot clearly but not the title or author. can someone help?!? the basic plot is a compliant niece leaves her impoverished sister and mother to live with a wealth aunt. the aunt is cranky but fair and truly comes to love the young woman. the aunt plans a marriage for the niece to a local curate which the girl refused. she is in love with another relation who the aunt does not approve of. meanwhile the curate is torn between two sisters, both of whom are ridiculous. in the end all is made right between the aunt and niece; she is married and both she and her husband live with the aunt and care for her. ring any bells?

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Originally Posted by amyspieg

i am desperate to remember a victorian i have recently read. i remember the plot clearly but not the title or author. can someone help?!? the basic plot is a compliant niece leaves her impoverished sister and mother to live with a wealth aunt. the aunt is cranky but fair and truly comes to love the young woman. the aunt plans a marriage for the niece to a local curate which the girl refused. she is in love with another relation who the aunt does not approve of. meanwhile the curate is torn between two sisters, both of whom are ridiculous. in the end all is made right between the aunt and niece; she is married and both she and her husband live with the aunt and care for her. ring any bells?

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Is it "He Knew He Was Right?" by Anthony Trollope? I watched the adaptation again recently, with David Tennant playing the Curate. It was an excellent adaptation. The brother of the girl who lived with the aunt was a friend to the main couple, and tried to help as the protagonist of the title got more and more obsessed and deluded about his wife's "supposed" adultery. Sounds like that one to me.

i don't think so. i have read that and will look back and see. but this storyline was the main focus of the novel. i keep going back to it being dickens or gaskell because i remember it had that type of sardonic humor.

but it sounds like Middlemarch by George Eliot.

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Originally Posted by dfloyd

but it sounds like Middlemarch by George Eliot.

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It's not Middlemarch. The obsessive husband bit sounds right, but there's not an aunt and two sisters vying for the curate. I still think it's the Trollope, or there are some remarkably similar books.

There were two silly sisters (Merry and Cherry Pecksniff) vying for someone in Martin Chuzzlewit, but he wasn't a curate. I still go for the Trollope.

It couldn't be, "The Portrait of a Woman", by Henry James, although there is a vague similarity... (I haven't finished that yet, cringe)