Frances Trollope in a Victorian Network of Women’s Biographies

Abstract

For the sake of inquiry, imagine a woman, Frances Milton Trollope (1779–1863), as a person in a network of the short biographies of women that circulated in books printed in Britain and North America in the nineteenth century. This persona is supposed to represent a historical individual with many documented relationships and activities. Most of the reasons for noting Frances Trollope today have to do with her role as a novelist, as the mother of writers, and as a travel writer. She gained international renown with her satiric documentary about the new republic, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and subsequently published novels and travel narratives at an alarming rate that salvaged the family finances.¹ Yet the woman known as “Mrs. Trollope” has not become the epitome of a Victorian woman writer.² Her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope’s two-volume biography, published in 1895, begins: “Forty years ago, any list of Englishwomen of Letters would have been held to be strangely incomplete without the name of Frances Trollope. Fashions change; reputations fade; books are forgotten.”³ Quite so, but there are also successive reconstructions of cultural periods and the careers of the once renowned.

N.B. The images associated with this chapter are housed in the digital annex at www.virtualvictorians.org .