Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Frances Trollope
-
Standard Name: Trollope, Frances
Birth Name: Frances Milton
Nickname: Fanny
Married Name: Frances Trollope
Frances Trollope
is best known for her novels and travel writing about early nineteenth-century America. She was also known for her outspoken social reform novels, and for her depictions of independent, intelligent, vulgar and manipulative women—often unmarried or widowed—who scheme intellectually-inferior men out of money and into marriage. FT
was herself known as blunt, intelligent, and witty; her writing reflects these traits, her Tory politics, and her advocacy for slaves, women, and the poor. She often introduced current witticisms and colloquialisms into her prose. Although she began writing only in her early fifties, she published thirty-four novels, six travel books, two long narrative poems, several verse dramas, scripts for home theatricals and many periodical contributions over a span of thirty years.
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989, 5 vols.
Button, Marilyn D. “Reclaiming Mrs. Frances Trollope: British Abolitionist and Feminist”. College Language Association Journal, Vol.
28
, No. 1, Sept. 1994, pp. 69-86.
69
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 21. Gale Research, 1983.
Szladits, Lola. “A Victorian Literary Correspondence: Letters from Julia Pardoe to Sir John Philippart, 1841-1860”. Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol.
55
, 1951, pp. 367-78.
368
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research, 1996.
166: 297-8
Literary responses
Frances Eleanor Trollope
The Athenæum lauded FET
's family knack of investing commonplace life with dramatic interest,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2514 (1876): 18
no doubt referring to her mother-in-law Frances Trollope
, and the latter's son, Anthony Trollope
.
Literary responses
Florence Marryat
The Academy was sweeping in its condemnation of Tom Tiddler's Ground. As a record of a lady's tour, it said, the book might please by means of its gossip and anecdotes, but as a...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Most reviews of North and South were positive, athough some criticized EG
for what they saw as inaccuracies in her portrayal of northern industrial life. Chorley
in the Athenæum called this one of the best...
Literary responses
Harriet Smythies
The Athenæum found that those who are not repelled by improbability will find much to amuse them
Athenæum. J. Lection.
708 (1841): 404
in The Marrying Man, and favourably compared some of the characterisation to character studies...
Literary responses
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
The Athenæum praised it as containing a thousand suggestions and considerations, which, being of no country, may be advantageously proposed to the young of every class for meditation, while simultaneously affording British readers (suggesting a...
Literary responses
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
wrote ecstatically to her mother of the success of this play on opening night, reporting that Frances Trollope
, between joy for my triumph and sympathy for the play, has cried herself half blind...
Literary responses
Ellen Wood
Within a few years EW
's popularity had decidedly waned. Margaret Oliphant
in The Victorian Age of English Literature found nothing to say about Wood beyond that fact that her works sold by the fifty...
Literary responses
Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
Thackeray
(associating Morgan in his comments with Frances Trollope
) said the cultural judgements in this book were based on nothing but tea-table gossip.
McMaster, Rowland D. Thackeray’s Cultural Frame of Reference: Allusion in The Newcomes. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991.
124
Literary responses
Catherine Hubback
She is discussed as one of a group of British women who travelled or settled in the USA (along with Fanny Kemble
, Frances Trollope
, Harriet Martineau
, Isabella Bird
, and the diarist...
Literary Setting
Mary Shelley
This novel has an epigraph from John Ford
's The Lover's Melancholy, 1629, about the storms and turmoil of human life.
Epigraphs to individual chapters range widely, beginning with the medieval Catalan poet...
Material Conditions of Writing
Mary Angela Dickens
The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD
's grandfather
and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...
Publishing
Harriet Taylor
HT
's reviews include an appraisal of Sarah Austin
's translation Tour of a German Prince, which appeared in May 1832.
Taylor, Harriet. The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. Editors Jacobs, Jo Ellen and Paula Harms Payne, Indiana University Press, 1998.
179n39
Hayek, Friedrich Augustus von et al. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; Their Correspondence [i.e. Friendship] and Subsequent Marriage. University of Chicago Press, 1951.
40
A harsh review of Frances Trollope
's Domestic Manners of the...
Reception
Anthony Trollope
Helen Heineman
, biographer of AT
's mother, argues that his vibrant, robust, and complex female characters and the way their predicament as women is presented, all owe their being to Frances Trollope
's literary...
Reception
Mary Russell Mitford
In the year of the final volume, Whittaker
was reported by Frances Trollope
as saying that MRM
's name would sell anything.
qtd. in
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2024, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Trollope, Frances. Tremordyn Cliff. Richard Bentley, 1835, 3 vols.
