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.
Button, Marilyn D. “Reclaiming Mrs. Frances Trollope: British Abolitionist and Feminist”. College Language Association Journal, Vol.
28
, No. 1, pp. 69-86.
69
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 21. Gale Research.
When Thackeray
published his Paris Sketch-Book in 1840, he self-consciously distanced himself from what he called the tea-party prattle of Morgan and Frances Trollope
(in Paris and the Parisians, 1836).
Jay, Elisabeth. “British Writers and Paris, 1840-1871: a research project in outline”. English Now: Selected Papers from the 20th IAUPE Conference in Lund 2007, edited by Marianne Thormählen, Lund University, pp. 110-17.
111
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, Yale University Press.
160 note
Her reports are more...
Textual Features
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
It was dedicated to Frances Trollope
, with the praise that all admire [her] incorruptible honesty, which in [her] amounts to sublimity.
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton,. The Budget of the Bubble Family. Edward Bull.
vi
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
In a preface Rosina Bulwer comments on her publishing difficulties: as usual...
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...
Textual Features
Phyllis Bentley
Bentley writes that the regional novel is characterized by detailed faithfulness to reality, a conscientious presentation of phenomena as they really happen in ordinary everyday life on a clearly defined spot of real earth, a...
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.
FET
published her last work, a biography of her mother-in-law, Frances Trollope
: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria.
Terry, Reginald Charles, editor. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope. Oxford University Press.
548
Textual Production
Elizabeth Gaskell
The idea of self-improvement through writing and reading correlates to the strong emphasis in EG
's fiction on education and the impact of environment. This was undoubtedly influenced by a Unitarian intellectual background indebted to...
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 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.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Flora Tristan
One chapter, entitled English Women, criticizes British social systems, and details the consequences women suffer because of the indissolubility of marriage.
Tristan, Flora. Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1840. Translators Palmer, Dennis and Giselle Pincetl, Charles River Books.
JT
's introduction to an edition of her ancestor Anthony Trollope
's autobiography, 1987 (reproduced in condensed form on her website), remarks that Frances Trollopein the end saved the family finances by her own...
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.
2: 268
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
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.
