SOURCE: Chisholm, Anne. “The Way Quite a Lot of Us Live Now.” Spectator 270, no. 8603 (29 May 1993): 27-8.

In the following review, Chisholm describes A Spanish Lover as “a wonderfully easy and agreeable read,” noting Trollope's skillful prose and the emotional viability of her characters.

With her six previous novels of contemporary middle-class English manners and morals, Joanna Trollope has over the last few years established, with striking success, a particular tone and territory. The tone is wry, humorous, sensible, sometimes bracingly sharp; the territory is the village, the country town, the rectory, the cathedral close, the doctor's surgery, the kitchen table and everyday middle-class English family life.

Her books do not try to be intellectually demanding, nor is her prose striking or original, although she writes well; but her observation is precise, her ear for the nuances of social life keen, and her interest in emotional minefields serious. She...