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
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.
124
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.
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, 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...
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
, pp. 367-78.
368
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research.
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.
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.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
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...
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.
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.
18
, No. 1, pp. 121-36.
122
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Trollope, Frances. Tremordyn Cliff. Richard Bentley, 1835.
Trollope, Frances. Uncle Walter. Colburn, 1852.
Trollope, Frances. Vienna and the Austrians. Richard Bentley, 1838.
