Novels rarely have subtitles; Anthony Trollope certainly didn't bother with them. But _He Knew He Was Right_ is a sitting duck for a frivolous little subtitle. How about _But He Was Wrong_? Or maybe _But She Knew He Was Wrong_? Or perhaps, _But She Wouldn't Pretend That He Was Right_? But of course any subtitle would have been redundant. The five-word title tells it all. Of course he wasn't right. But he was stubborn. And she was stubborn. And in this case, it was a case of terminal stubbornness. The problem with _He Knew He Was Right_ is that the man who knows he is right, Louis Trevelyan, fails to overcome his terminal stubbornness. Or perhaps we should refer to it as a paranoid personality disorder--or maybe as the prevailing diagnosis of the time: madness. Whatever we call it, it isn't pretty, and the story of his progressive delusion is not a pleasant one. Interesting, yes. So is _Crime and Punishment_. But both stories tell how someone happened to think and do the wrong thing, and these are unpleasant subjects. Both books dilute the dose with little subplots that add humor and diversion. But the main story line is still the main story line. Louis Trevelyan, a young husband, is annoyed by the daily visits to his wife by her godfather, Colonel Osborne, a bachelor with a reputation for pursuing beautiful young married women. He objects, she resents the objection, and both husband and wife shoot past the point of negotiation with their first discussion of the subject. Both are stubborn, things go downhill from there, and in the end Louis Trevelyan goes mad and suffers the consequences. Trevelyan was set up by circumstances, and to understand some of these circumstances, we must take note of the laws of England at that time. English common law stated that in marriage, two became one, and that one was the husband in the eyes of the law. The husband was indeed the lord and master. In regard to children, John Stuart Mill wrote of the wife's subordination in marriage, "They are by law his children . . . . No one act can she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from him." This was part of the system of coverture, in which a married woman surrendered her legal existence, which was suspended during her marriage, "or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything." [1] The efforts of Victorian feminists, who considered this to be "marital slavery," led to the Married Woman's Property Act of 1882, twenty years after this book was written; but even this was only a partial solution. It was not until 1923 that grounds for divorce were made the same for both sexes, and divorce remained expensive until Legal Aid became available in 1949. [Footnote 1: Sir William Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_, 1765-1769]