Trilby by George du Maurier

I feel like this book just hasn't aged well. I found it very confusing reading because of its strange tone, a kind of bizarre mix of humour and tragedy and Gothic. Also the humour is very high-brow and Victorian, loads of contemporary allusions and weird puns in French. I just couldn't figure out how seriously everything that was happening was supposed to be taken, which is very interesting in a way, but also very confusing. And of course, it's distressingly antisemitic, the way lots of Victorian literature is just casually antisemitic. It's very well-written and clever, but also makes for challenging and often unpalatable reading. I think what really interested me most about it was the character of Trilby, who acts and talks in an incredibly free way, and doesn't at all conform to the ideal of the Victorian heroine. She works posing 'for the figure' (in the nude) for various artists, and one day just walks into the studio of the three English artists/art students, sits down on a chair, and starts chatting to them. She isn't a 'New Woman'-type character at all, in that she isn't interested in asserting women's rights or anything, she just does what she wants and doesn't care what anyone thinks. That's one of the things I really like about reading neglected Victorian novels; I think we often have really rigid ideas about how characters in Victorian novels think and behave, but when I stumble across works that aren't well-known, it's always surprising how varied and interesting characters can be. I think what I found most trying was the tone of the book, I couldn't understand at all if du Maurier is being serious or not. He does things like have one of the characters spend several pages dramatically reflecting on religion, and then ends the whole thing with 'So the little man went on, as if he knew all about it, had found it all out for himself, and nobody else had ever found it out before... carried away by the flood of his own eloquence... he again apostrophized the dog Tray, who had been growing somewhat inattentive (like the reader, perhaps)'. It's really hard to figure out what to make of it, why does du Maurier give us all the reflections about religion perfectly seriously, and then undercut it in that way? He does stuff like this throughout the whole novel, and it makes it really hard to truly relate to the characters or take their troubles seriously. I was also surprised that Svengali's hypnotism of Trilby (which I thought was what the book would be all about) actually took up very little space, and is actually just one of several plots, the whole thing is generally somewhat picaresque and doesn't really seem be one narrative. Anyhow, it was a very interesting book, but not at all what I was expecting, and it made me think more about it than really like it.