Frances Milton Trollope, also known as Fanny Trollope (10 March 1779 – 6 October 1863), was an English novelist who wrote as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her book, ''

Domestic Manners of the Americans ''Domestic Manners of the Americans'' is a two-volume travel book by Frances Milton Trollope, published in 1832, which follows her travels through America and her residence in Cincinnati, at the time still a frontier town. Context Frances Troll ...

'' (1832), observations from a trip to the United States, is the best known. She also wrote social novels: one against slavery is said to have influenced

Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (; June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American author and Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and wrote the popular novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (185 ...

, and she also wrote the first industrial novel, and two

anti-Catholic Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards Catholics and opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy, and its adherents. Scholars have identified four categories of anti-Catholicism: constitutional-national, theological, popular and socio-cul ...

novels, which used a Protestant position to examine self-making. Some recent scholars note that

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

critics have omitted women writers such as Frances Trollope. In 1839, ''

The New Monthly Magazine ''The New Monthly Magazine'' was a British monthly magazine published from 1814 to 1884. It was founded by Henry Colburn and published by him through to 1845. History Colburn and Frederic Shoberl established ''The New Monthly Magazine and Uni ...

'' claimed, "No other author of the present day has been at once so read, so much admired, and so much abused". Two of her sons, Thomas Adolphus and

Anthony Anthony, also spelled Antony, is a masculine given name derived from the '' Antonii'', a '' gens'' ( Roman family name) to which Mark Antony (''Marcus Antonius'') belonged. According to Plutarch, the Antonii gens were Heracleidae, being descenda ...

, became writers, as did her daughter-in-law

Frances Eleanor Trollope Frances Eleanor Trollope (née Ternan; 1 August 1835 – 14 August 1913) was an English novelist. She was best known for her biography of her mother-in-law, Frances Milton Trollope, who was famous for her book, ''Domestic Manners of the American ...

(née Ternan), second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope.

Biography

Born at

Stapleton, Bristol Stapleton is an area in the northeastern suburbs of the city of Bristol, England. The name is colloquially used today to describe the ribbon village along Bell Hill and Park Road in the Frome Valley. It borders Eastville to the South and Begbro ...

, Frances was the third daughter and middle child of the Reverend William Milton and Mary Milton (née Gresley). Frances was five years old when her mother died in childbirth. Her father was remarried to Sarah Partington of Clifton in 1800. She was baptised at St Michael's, Bristol, on 17 March 1779. As a child, Frances read a great amount of English, French and Italian literature. She and her sister later moved to Bloomsbury, London, in 1803 to live with their brother, Henry Milton, who was employed in the War Office.

Marriage and family

In London, she met Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister. At the age of 30, she married him on 23 May 1809 in

Heckfield Heckfield is a village in Hampshire, England. It lies between Reading and Hook. It is the location of Highfield House, where Neville Chamberlain Arthur Neville Chamberlain (; 18 March 18699 November 1940) was a British politician who ...

, Hampshire. They had four sons and three daughters: Thomas Adolphus, Henry, Arthur (who died in 1824) Emily (who died in a day), Anthony, Cecilia and Emily. When the Trollopes moved to a leased farm at Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1817, they faced financial struggles for lack of agricultural expertise. This was where Frances gave birth to her last two children. Two of her sons and one daughter also became writers. Her eldest surviving son,

Thomas Adolphus Trollope Thomas Adolphus Trollope (29 April 1810 – 11 November 1892) was an English writer who was the author of more than 60 books. He lived most of his life in Italy creating a renowned villa in Florence with his first wife, Theodosia, and later ...

, wrote mostly histories: ''The Girlhood of

Catherine de Medici Catherine de' Medici (, ; , ; 13 April 1519 – 5 January 1589) was an Italian Florentine noblewoman of the Medici family and Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 by marriage to King Henry II. She was the mother of French kings Fran ...

'', ''History of Florence'', ''What I Remember'', ''Life of

Pius IX Pope Pius IX (; born Giovanni Maria Battista Pietro Pellegrino Isidoro Mastai-Ferretti; 13 May 1792 – 7 February 1878) was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878. His reign of nearly 32 years is the longest verified of any pope in hist ...

'', and some novels. Her fourth son

Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope ( ; 24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was an English novelist and civil servant of the Victorian era. Among the best-known of his 47 novels are two series of six novels each collectively known as the ''Chronicles of Barsetshire ...

became a well-known and received novelist, establishing a strong reputation, especially for his serial novels, such as those set in the fictional county of

Barsetshire Barsetshire is a fictional English county created by Anthony Trollope in the series of novels known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855–1867). The county town and cathedral city is Barchester. Other towns named in the novels include Silverbr ...

, and his political series the

Palliser novels The Palliser novels are six novels written in series by Anthony Trollope. They were more commonly known as the Parliamentary novels prior to their 1974 television dramatisation by the BBC broadcast as '' The Pallisers''. Marketed as "polite li ...

. Cecilia Trollope Tilley published a novel in 1846. Despite producing six living children, the Trollopes' marriage was reputedly unhappy.

Move to America

Soon after the move to the leased farm, her marital and financial strains led Frances to seek companionship and aid from

Fanny Wright Frances Wright (September 6, 1795 – December 13, 1852), widely known as Fanny Wright, was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, utopian socialist, abolitionist, social reformer, and Epicurean philosopher, who became a ...

, ward of the French hero

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette (; 6 September 1757 – 20 May 1834), known in the United States as Lafayette (), was a French military officer and politician who volunteered to join the Conti ...

. In 1824 she visited La Grange, Lafayette's estate in France. Over the next three years, she made several other visits to France and was inspired to take an American excursion with Wright. Frances thought of America as a simple economic venture and figured that she could save money by sending her children through Wright's communal school, as Wright had planned to reform the education of African American children and the formerly enslaved on their property in Tennessee. In November 1827, Frances Trollope went with some of her family to Fanny Wright's

utopian A utopia ( ) typically describes an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book ''Utopia'', which describes a fictional island soci ...

community

Nashoba Commune The Nashoba Community was an experimental project of Fanny WFrances "Fanny" Wright, initiated in 1825 to educate and emancipate slaves. It was located in a 2,000-acre (8 km2) woodland on the side of present-day Germantown, Tennessee, a Memph ...

in the United States. She took her son, Henry, and her two daughters, Charlotte and Emily. Her husband, Thomas Anthony, and remaining sons, Tom and Anthony, stayed at home and continued their education. In October 1828, Tom and his father joined Frances in Cincinnati, leaving Anthony at boarding school. They returned to England in January 1829. Arriving in the United States one year earlier than her husband, she developed an intimate relationship with Auguste Hervieu, a collaborator in her venture. (This is not verified.) After the community failed, Trollope moved to Cincinnati, Ohio with her family. She also encouraged the sculptor

Hiram Powers Hiram Powers (July 29, 1805 – June 27, 1873) was an American neoclassical sculptor. He was one of the first 19th-century American artists to gain an international reputation, largely based on his famous marble sculpture '' The Greek Slave''. ...

to do

Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri (; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer, and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called ...

's '' Commedia'' in waxworks. Nonetheless, all the ways she tried to support herself in America were unsuccessful. She found the cultural climate uninteresting and came to resent democracy. Furthermore, after her venture failed, her family was more in debt than when she had migrated there and they were forced to move back to England in 1831.

Return to Europe

From her return at the age of 50 until her death, Trollope's need of an income for her family and to escape her debts led her to begin writing novels, memoirs of her travels, and other shorter pieces, while travelling around Europe. She became well acquainted with elites and figures of Victorian literature including

Elizabeth Barrett Elizabeth Barrett Browning (née Moulton-Barrett; 6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work receiv ...

Robert Browning Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian literature, Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentar ...

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and Social criticism, social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by ...

Joseph Henry Green Joseph Henry Green FRCS (1 November 1791 – 13 December 1863) was an eminent English surgeon who also became the literary executor for Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Green was the nephew of another eminent surgeon, Henry Cline. After studying in ...

and R. W. Thackeray (a relative of

William Makepeace Thackeray William Makepeace Thackeray ( ; 18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist and illustrator. He is known for his Satire, satirical works, particularly his 1847–1848 novel ''Vanity Fair (novel), Vanity Fair'', a panoramic portra ...

). She wrote more than 41 books: six travelogues, 35 novels, countless controversial articles, and poems. In 1843, Frances visited Italy and eventually moved to Florence permanently.

Writing career

Trollope already gained notice with her first book ''

'' (1832). She gave an unfavourable, and in the opinions of America's partisans, an exaggerated account. Her novel, ''The Refugee in America'' (1832), expressed similar views, prompting Catharine Sedgwick to respond that "Mrs. Trollope, though she has told some disagreeable truths, has for the most part caricatured till the resemblance is lost." She was thought to reflect the disparaging views of American society that were allegedly commonplace at that time among English people of the higher social classes. Later Trollope wrote further travel works, such as ''Belgium and Western Germany in 1833'' (1834), ''Paris and the Parisians in 1835'' (1836), and ''Vienna and the Austrians'' (1838). Among those with whom she became acquainted in Brussels was the future novelist Anna Harriett Drury.

Novels

Next came ''The Abbess'' (1833), an

novel, as was ''Father Eustace'' (1847). While both borrowed from

Victorian Gothic Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic or neo-Gothic) is an Architectural style, architectural movement that after a gradual build-up beginning in the second half of the 17th century became a widespread movement in the first half ...

conventions, the scholar Susan Griffin notes that Trollope wrote a Protestant critique of Catholicism that also expressed "a gendered set of possibilities for self-making", which has been little recognised by scholars. She noted that "

Modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

's lingering legacy in criticism meant overlooking a woman's nineteenth century studies of religious controversy." Trollope received more attention in her lifetime for what are considered several strong novels of social protest: ''Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw'' (1836) was the first anti-slavery novel, influencing the American

's ''

Uncle Tom's Cabin ''Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly'' is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two Volume (bibliography), volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans ...

'' (1852). It focuses on two powerful families – one that strongly encourages slavery and another that strongly opposes it and provides sanctuary for slave refugees. It antagonizes pro-slavery characters, making them appear foolish and uncultured. Frances also brings out her idea of a stereotypical American by drawing certain characters as shrewd, convincing, sly and greedy. Published in 1840, ''Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy'' was the first industrial novel to be published in Britain, inspired by Frances's visit to Manchester in 1832, where she examined the conditions of children employed in the textile mills. The story of a factory boy who is rescued by a wealthy benefactor at first, but later returns to the mills, illustrates the misery of factory life and suggests that private philanthropy alone will not solve the widespread misery of factory employment. Other socially conscious novels of hers include ''The Vicar of Wrexhill'' (1837, Richard Bentley, London, 3 volumes), which took on the issue of corruption in the

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the State religion#State churches, established List of Christian denominations, Christian church in England and the Crown Dependencies. It is the mother church of the Anglicanism, Anglican Christian tradition, ...

and evangelical circles. Possibly her greatest work is the ''Widow Barnaby'' trilogy (1839–1855), which includes the first ever sequel. In particular,

Michael Sadleir Michael Sadleir (25 December 1888 – 13 December 1957), born Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler, was a British publisher, novelist, book collector, and Bibliography, bibliographer. Biography Michael Sadleir was born in Oxford, Oxford, England, the ...

considers the skilful set-up of ''Petticoat Government''

850 __NOTOC__ Year 850 ( DCCCL) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * February 1 – King Ramiro I dies in his palace at Santa María del Naranco (near Oviedo), after an 8-year reign ...

with its cathedral city, clerical psychology and domineering female, as something of a formative influence on her son's elaborate and colourful cast of characters in ''

Barchester Towers ''Barchester Towers'' is a novel by English author Anthony Trollope published by Longmans in 1857. It is the second book in the ''Chronicles of Barsetshire'' series, preceded by '' The Warden'' and followed by '' Doctor Thorne''. In his autob ...

'', notably Mrs. Proudie.

Later life and death

In later years Frances Trollope continued to write novels and books on miscellaneous subjects – in all over 100 volumes. In her own time, she was considered to have acute powers of observation and a sharp and caustic wit, but her prolific production coupled with the rise of modernist criticism caused her works to be overlooked in the 20th century. Few of her books are now read, but her first and two others are available on

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...

. After the death of her husband and daughter, in 1835 and 1838 respectively, Trollope moved to

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

, Italy, having lived, briefly, at

Carleton, Eden Carleton is a suburb of the town of Penrith, Cumbria, Penrith, Cumbria, England, that has seen a huge growth in housing since the 1960s and is, of 2018, still expanding due to the Carleton Meadows, Carleton Manor and Woodberry Heights developme ...

in Cumbria, but finding that (in her son Tom's words) "the sun yoked his horses too far from Penrith town." One year, she invited Theodosia Garrow to be her house guest. Garrow married her son Thomas Adolphus, and the three lived together until Trollope's death in 1863. She was buried near four other members of the Trollope household in the

English Cemetery of Florence The English Cemetery in Florence, Italy (Italian, ''Cimitero degli inglesi'', ''Cimitero Porta a' Pinti'' and ''Cimitero Protestante'') is an Evangelical cemetery located at Piazzale Donatello. Although its origins date to its foundation in 1827 ...

Major works

*''

'' (1832) *''Belgium and Western Germany in 1833'' (1834) *''Tremordyn Cliff'' (1835) *''Paris and the Parisians in 1835'' (1836) *''The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi'' (1836

retitled ''Lynch Law; etc.'' in 1857 edition *''

The Vicar of Wrexhill ''The Vicar of Wrexhill'' is an 1837 novel by the British writer Frances Milton Trollope, originally published in three volumes. The High Church Anglican Trollope was heavily critical of the Evangelical movement. It has been described as a "scur ...

'' (1837) *''Vienna and the Austrians'' (1838) *''The Widow Barnaby'' (1839) *''The Widow Married; A Sequel to the Widow Barnaby'' (1840) *''The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy'' (1840) *''Charles Chesterfield, or the Adventures of a Youth of Genius'' (1841) *''A Visit to Italy'' (1842) *''The Refugee in America'' (1842) *''The Ward of Thorpe-Combe'' (1842) *''The Barnabys in America, or Adventures of the Widow Wedded'' (1843) *''Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day'' (1844) *''Young Love, A Novel'' (1844) *''Travels and Travelers: A Series of Sketches'' (1846) *''Town and Country, A Novel'' (1848) *''The Young Countess, or, Love and Jealousy'' (1848) *''The Old World and the New, A Novel'' (1849) *''The Lottery of Marriage'' (1849) *''Petticoat Government, A Novel'' (1850) *''Mrs. Mathews, or Family Mysteries, A Novel'' (1851) *''The Young Heiress, A Novel'' (1853)

References

Sources

* This article on her son has a short biography of her.

External links

*
Works by or about Frances Milton Trollope
at

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