Frances Trollope

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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.
21: 321-2

Milestones

10 March 1779

Frances Milton (later FT ) was born at Stapleton near Bristol.
FT 's daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope gave her date of birth as 1780 in her memoir, and was followed by the Dictionary of National Biography and biographer Johanna Johnston among others. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has revised the date to 1779, which appears too in various other sources.
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.
Trollope, Frances Eleanor. Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria. AMS Press.
I: 8
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.

After 19 April 1822

FT wrote her first publicly circulated poem, Lines Written on the Burial of the Daughter of a Celebrated Author in memory of Lord Byron 's illegitimate daughter Allegra .
Hall, N. John. Salmagundi: Byron, Allegra, and the Trollope Family. Beta Phi Mu.
32, 36

19 March 1832

FT 's controversial best-seller, Domestic Manners of the Americans, was published, bringing her immediate fame and dramatically improving her financial situation.
Heineman, Helen. Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio University Press.
78
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.

By 10 August 1839

FT 's The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, possibly the first industrial novel, appeared with a date of 1840.
Texts that anticipate its interest in industrial relations include Harriet Martineau 's novella A Manchester Strike, 1832.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
615 (1839): 587-90
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.

6 October 1863

FT died at Florence at the age of eighty-three.
Heineman gives her age at her death as eighty-four, reflecting the conflict surrounding her birth date. The above date is confirmed by Frances Eleanor, who had access to the family letters.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Heineman, Helen. Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio University Press.
255
Trollope, Frances Eleanor. Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria. AMS Press.
II: 301

Biography

Birth

10 March 1779

Frances Milton (later FT ) was born at Stapleton near Bristol.
FT 's daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope gave her date of birth as 1780 in her memoir, and was followed by the Dictionary of National Biography and biographer Johanna Johnston among others. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has revised the date to 1779, which appears too in various other sources.
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.
Trollope, Frances Eleanor. Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria. AMS Press.
I: 8
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.