There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Trollope’s line wryly contrasts lived experience with the conventions of Victorian fiction. In real life, love is entangled with uncertainty, jealousy, social pressure, and the slow compromises of marriage; it rarely delivers a clean, lasting “happily ever after.” By specifying “the end of an English novel,” he points to a narrative formula in which courtship plots culminate in resolution—engagement or marriage—precisely where the story stops, before the harder work of sustaining happiness begins. The remark is thus both a satire of literary expectations and a sober comment on the limits of romantic idealization.