Fanny Trollope (1780–1863) was one of the most successful English writers of the mid-19th century. Between 1832 and 1856 she brought out half a dozen travel books and thirty-five novels, most of them best-sellers that stayed in print until the end of the century. Although she belonged to the generation of Jane Austen, she didn't start writing until she was in her fifties, so she was mostly in direct competition with writers a generation younger, like Dickens and Thackeray (not so much with her own sons Tom and Anthony, who were also late starters: Anthony's first real success with The Warden only came in 1853). She got in before Dickens with (amongst other things) an anti-slavery novel and a Poor-Law protest novel; her novel about child-labour in factories, Michael Armstrong, made Dickens change the planned course of Nicholas Nickleby and postpone his own venture into the industrial North to a later book.

Yet, these days, most of us are only barely aware that Anthony Trollope had a mother. If we know of her as a writer, then it's only as the author of Domestic manners of the Americans, which currently has more than ten times as many copies on LT as her next most popular work, the novel The widow Barnaby. A quick browse through several books about nineteenth-century novelists on my shelves failed to bring up any references to her. Neville-Sington speculates that this collective amnesia may have something to do with the bad press she gets in Anthony's An Autobiography — she notes that the last reprints of most of her books were around or shortly before the appearance of An Autobiography in 1883. Anthony never really seems to have forgiven her for going off to America in 1827 with his brother Henry and the two girls, leaving him, Tom, and their father behind in Harrow, so that he found himself having to do without a mother between the ages of 12 and 16. It obviously didn't help that, for much of his writing career, the critics were comparing his books to those of his more famous mother. He retaliates by putting a superficially affectionate but actually rather condescending portrait of her into his memoir, making her look like a clumsy, unsophisticated blunderer, dashing off second-rate books at high speed to feed the family.

Of course, she was writing for money: her husband's pride, stubbornness and lack of business sense, coupled with her own American disasters, had brought them badly into debt (Thomas Anthony Trollope is the prototype for all those high-principled, stubborn middle-aged men steering into disaster in his son's novels). Writing was the only way a middle-class married woman could earn anything like a decent income, so she had to teach herself to do it well and efficiently, and she had the good luck that the American adventure had given her an angle for a travel book that no other British writer had used before: instead of travelling round the country on letters of introduction from one prosperous East-Coast host to the next, she had been trying to run a series of business ventures in Cincinnati, so she got to see "the Americans" in their natural habitat, pigs, smells and tobacco stains included. And she managed to offend an entire continent so thoroughly that they all had to buy the book just to see how offensive it really was. Oddly, people seemed to take more exception to her criticising their table-manners and the constant spitting than to her more serious comments about the fundamental hypocrisy in American attitudes to religion, native peoples, and slavery.

I found Neville-Sington's Browning book quite hard going: this one also suffers in readability from the author's determination to pin every incident and person in the subject's life down in a quotation from one of her books (or one of her sons' books). But it is a very interesting story: Fanny Trollope comes over as a fascinating character, and probably a very likeable one. She had a tough life by most standards — she outlived all but two of her seven children and several of her grandchildren; her life with her increasingly bad-tempered and unreliable husband can't have been fun; the American venture was a long series of humiliating defeats, and when she got home things were even worse; she found herself having to take over the role of breadwinner without any kind of training or experience; she was frequently mocked or insulted for presuming to speak out in public — but she seems to have had tremendous resources of cheerfulness and enterprise that helped her to bounce back from each new disaster and carry on. And she brings a robust, Georgian way of thinking into the Age of the Antimacassar: her views on social, moral and religious issues all seem remarkably straightforward and free from hypocrisy by early-Victorian standards. It's also very interesting to see some of the background that Anthony's novels come out of. Neville-Sington makes a lot out of the parallels between themes and characters in the novels of mother and son, which makes me want to read some of Fanny's novels now... ( )