(2 of 3)
Duchess of Omnium. Along the way, their lives intertwine with—among a hundred or so others—a headstrong early feminist, Alice Vavasor, and her rascally cousin George; a young radical M.P. from Ireland, Phineas Finn; and a mistreated wife, Lady Laura Kennedy, who flees from her cruel husband, a rich Scottish baron.
Trollope took six volumes and about 4,400 leisurely pages to tell the story. In dramatizing it, Raven has indeed taken considerable, but for the most part justifiable license with the material. Several subplots and some vivid characters have been eliminated entirely. Some important new scenes have been added—Glencora and Plantagenet are already married, for example, when Trollope begins the Palliser novels—and dialogue has been modernized. "I could seldom transcribe Trollope's text for more than two speeches at a time," says Raven. "I had to invent and deploy my own 'Trollopese.' "
Talking about her love for Burgo, for instance, Trollope's Glencora says: "They told me he would ill-use me, and desert me—perhaps beat me. I do not believe it; but even though that should have been so, I regret it. It is better to have a false husband than to be a false wife." Raven's Glencora is less long-winded. "I would rather be beaten by Burgo Fitzgerald," she says, "than kissed by any other man." Perhaps Raven's greatest liberty, however, has been his emphasis on the Pallisers, particularly Glencora, among the novels' myriad families and alliances. Explains Raven: "The heroine of a television series must never be less than prominent."
Sweat and Gibber. Raven, 49, is also a writer of mysteries and high-class potboilers (Friends in Low Places) that dwell on sex and intrigue among the upper classes. But he has been a dedicated Trollopian since his undergraduate days at Cambridge. Nevertheless, he spent six months "sweating and gibbering" before he found the right blueprint for the series, which he suggested. He would throw out Trollope's character A as boring and superfluous —only to watch her turn up 700 pages later as someone essential to the denouement. Character B would be discarded, then put quickly back when it was obvious that B was the motivation behind C, who was so important that he could not conceivably be strong-armed into oblivion. "It was the same trouble with everyone I tried to get rid of," Raven complains. "They all kept pushing themselves back in again for seemingly ungainsayable reasons."
Susan Hampshire added her own dimension to Glencora. "I never forgave her for allowing herself to marry a man without love," she says, "and I never came to terms with her for that reason. So I took a slight license, and I warmed up the relationship between them." Despite previous Emmy Award-winning roles in other series—as Fleur Forsyte, Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair and Sarah Churchill in The First Churchills —Hampshire, 34, was still only the third candidate for Glencora. Pauline Collins, the saucy under-houseparlormaid Sarah of Upstairs, Downstairs, demanded more money than the producers wanted to pay, and Hayley Mills, the second choice, had just had a baby and felt she lacked energy for such a demanding role.