Frances Trollope

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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.
21: 321-2
Photograph of a painting of Frances Trollope by Auguste Hervieu, c. 1832, seated in a red upholstered chair, against a dark background. She is wearing a dark red-brown dress with blue and gold cuffs, a blue and gold buckle on the waistband, and large lace collar matching the bonnet that covers her dark, smooth, middle-parted hair. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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 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.
Shelley, Mary. Lodore. Editor Vargo, Lisa, Broadview, 1997.
47
Epigraphs to individual chapters range widely, beginning with the medieval Catalan poet...
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...
Textual Features Janet Schaw
Her editors call her a forerunner of Frances Trollope in her American critique, though her attitudes are shaped by reactionary political views in a way that Trollope's are not.
Schaw, Janet. Journal of a Lady of Quality. Editors Andrews, Evangeline Walker and Charles McLean Andrews, Third Edition, Yale University Press, 1939.
160 note
Her reports are more...
Leisure and Society Julia Pardoe
JP associated with Frances Trollope , and corresponded with Mrs John Hearne , Samuel Carter Hall and Anna Maria Hall , Francis and Margaret Bennoch , and Sir John Philippart .
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
Textual Production Julia Pardoe
JP may have borrowed her subtitle from the title of Frances Trollope 's celebrated Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832.Her work was three times reprinted within the next twenty years.
Friends, Associates Mary Russell Mitford
She knew most of the literary women of her day, including Felicia Hemans (who wrote to ask her for an autograph),
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett, 1882, 2 vols.
1: 173-4
Jane Porter , Amelia Opie (that warm-hearted person),
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 213
Wealth and Poverty Mary Russell Mitford
The prime movers of this achievement were Henry F. Chorley (who later edited her letters) and the Rev. William Harness ; the name of Queen Victoria headed the list of subscribers.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
116: 195
Pigrome, Stella. “Mary Russell Mitford”. The Charles Lamb Bulletin, Vol.
66
, Charles Lamb Society, Apr. 1989, pp. 53-62.
54
It...
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, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.
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...
Textual Production Mary Russell Mitford
MRM wrote to Macready in April 1823 about this play, or the idea for it; she was afraid he did not like it. She found the subject in Gibbon 's Decline and Fall of the...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Travel Mary Russell Mitford
MRM made a trip to Bath, during which she met Frances Trollope and Walter Savage Landor .
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 268
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
116: 195
Travel Mary Russell Mitford
Scholar Katie Halsey notes that she positioned herself at the heart of a network of literary people, both male and female, and dedicated much of her time to forming and keeping up literary friendships.
Halsey, Katie. “Tell Me of some Booklings: Mary Russell Mitford’s Female Literary Networks”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
18
, No. 1, 2011, pp. 121-36.
122
Textual Features Harriet Martineau
When Henry Milman begged HM (who was about to publish on the topic of America) not to attack his friend Frances Trollope , she replied: you don't suppose I am going to occupy any...

Timeline

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Texts

Trollope, Frances. Tremordyn Cliff. Richard Bentley, 1835, 3 vols.
Trollope, Frances. Uncle Walter. Colburn, 1852, 3 vols.
Trollope, Frances. Vienna and the Austrians. Richard Bentley, 1838, 2 vols.