Long overshadowed by her more widely read and reprinted son Anthony, Frances Trollope is almost exclusively remembered for her travel writing and especially for the notoriously controversial Domestic Manners of the Americans. Her impressively prolific career as a writer, however, covered and transgressed several genres, and spanned the early 1830s right through until the mid-1850s. A contemporary of Jane Austen, Trollope wrote social-problem novels about industrial England and satirical exposures of evangelical Christianity, as well as writing the first anti-slavery novel. She was a controversial, yet popular and prolific, writer who lived on her works, while using them to vent her outrage at various social and cultural developments of the time. A reassessment of her position in nineteenth-century literary culture brings to attention her own versatility as well as the various ways in which the pressing issues of the time could be represented and, in turn, helped to form Victorian literature.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Women's Writing.
1. Introduction: Beyond Domestic Manners: Repositioning Frances Trollope in Literary History Tamara S. Wagner
2. Frances Trollope’s One Fault and the Evolution of the Novel Elsie B. Michie
3. Frances Trollope as Crime Writer Lucy Sussex
4. The Vexing Vicar of Wrexhill: Frances Trollope’s Vinegary Distaste for Evangelicalism Brenda Ayres
5. "Very nearly smiling": Comedy and Slave Revolt in The Barnabys in America Christine Sutphin
6. "Did you ever hear of such a thing as Settlements?": Settling Outstanding Accounts in Frances Trollope’s American Novels Tamara S. Wagner
7. "The Parisian beau monde": Frances Trollope’s Representations of France Barbara Pauk
8. Industrial Sightseeing and Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy Susan Walton
Biography
Tamara S. Wagner is Associate Professor of English Literature, specialising in Victorian Literature, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Previous publications include Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901 (2010) and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004), as well as edited collections on Victorian Settler Narratives (2011) and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009). She is on the editorial board of the Victorians Institute Journal.
