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.