How long does it take to read The American Senator?
The American Senator by Anthony Trollope takes about 10 hours 7 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 7 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1877. 552 pages, about 151,800 words.
21 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 52 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 7 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 20 minutes |
The page count is the median across 39 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This is one of Trollope's best novels, in the present writer's opinion. Among several intermingled plots, the story arc of Arabella Trefoil is the most rewarding. The husband-hunting Arabella is absolutely one of Trollope's best characters. She is grand-daughter to a great Duke, yet her social position is precarious, because her father was a wastrel younger son who married a woman of low birth (her father was "in trade!"). He engrossed her large fortune and squandered it, leaving his estranged wife and daughter nearly destitute, and yet with an expensive social position to maintain. Read this book for Trollope's masterly delineation of how these circumstances harrow the soul and deform the character of a young woman. With no fortune except a relentless will, Arabella must marry well to save herself from the abyss of middle-aged spinsterhood, poverty, and social death. Arabella has learned to regard the men in her life as stupid but powerful enemies against whom any cruel or dishonest treatment is thoroughly justified. Men are to be flattered, fooled and captured, or dealt with according to the laws of war. Trollope makes clear that Arabella is what her avaricious, hypocritical, patriarchal social class has made her into, and she is a sympathetic character despite her hardened heart. When she is introduced, she is nearly thirty and is nearing the end of the line as a marriageable girl. "I'll tell you what it is, mamma. I've been at it till I'm nearly broken down. I must settle somewhere;—or else die;—or else run away. I can't stand this any longer and I won't. Talk of work,—men's work! What man ever has to work as I do?" The eponymous American Senator is Elias Gotobed, of the fictional American state of Mickewa, who visits England apparently in order to inflict his opinions on everyone he meets. Trollope's senator is a self-righteous, pontificating horse's ass who offends against hospitality by lecturing and berating his hosts and their other guests at the dinner…
Subjects: Fiction, Legislators, Americans, United States, Social life and customs, marriage
