SOURCE: “‘Something Both More and Less Than Manliness’: Gender and the Literary Reception of Anthony Trollope,” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 22, 1994, pp. 151-71.

“We state our opinion of it [Barchester Towers] as decidedly the cleverest novel of the season, and one of the most masculine delineations of modern life … that we have seen for many a day”—Westminster Review 1857

“My husband, who can seldom get a novel to hold him, has been held by all three [The Warden, Barchester Towers, and The Three Clerks], and by this [The Three Clerks] the strongest. … What a thoroughly man's book it is! I much admire it.”—Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1859, qtd. in Smalley 64

“We may say, on the whole, that Thackeray was written for men and women, and Trollope for women.”—The Literary World, 1884

“But this prolific author, often dismissed in his own time as a writer for Mudie's and jeunes filles, gradually accepted as a creator of adult books for adult minds … seems still in process of being discovered.”—Lionel Stevenson 1964

Gender is not something that contemporary twentieth-century critics tend to take into account or consider important when they write about Trollope's literary reputation.¹ And Victorian critical reaction to Anthony Trollope does not at first glance seem structured around preoccupations with gender. A closer examination of commentary on Barchester Towers and on Trollope's later works reveals, however, that Victorian critics do employ gendered thinking to assess Trollope's works, and that their overall evaluation of his literary strengths and weaknesses does carry important gender associations and connotations. As the opening quotations indicate, Trollope has in turn, and sometimes even simultaneously, been seen as an intensely masculine writer directing himself toward a male audience, and as a popular writer focusing on young women's love affairs and emotional confusions, writing to a predominantly female circulating library audience. Unlike Charles Reade or Emily Brontë, for example, who respectively conform to or deviate from conventional expectations about gendered writing, Trollope is variously thought to do both. In order to investigate this apparent paradox, this article will examine the role of gender in several aspects of critical discussion about Trollope, including the relation between his social persona and his writing, the subject matter of his novels, his depiction of male and female characters, his popularity, his prolific production of novels, and the nature of his imagination and inspiration. This article will argue that gender considerations influence the seriousness with which Victorian critics take Trollope and that the often pejorative connotations of femininity can also be applied to men in Victorian literary criticism.

There is evidence to suggest that from the 1860s to the end of the nineteenth century the criteria used by Victorian reviewers to judge novels became increasingly polarized according to gender, with “masculine” qualities in writing more strongly valorized, and “feminine” qualities denigrated accordingly. Gaye Tuchman, in Edging Women Out, sees this unwritten poetics of gender as evidence of men's desire to wrest control of the economics of the literary marketplace from women. She argues that it was women's success in the genre of novel-writing in the 1840s and 1850s that gave men the provocation and desire to “edge women out”: “partly as a reaction to women's prominence as novelists, partly as a reaction against the … library-subscribers who crowned the ‘queens of the circulating library,’ and partly because of the clear economic opportunities that the novel offered writers, men began to define the high-culture novel as a male preserve” (47). Tuchman's argument is supported by, among other things, the archives of the publishing house of Macmillan. Women submitted more novels than men in the 1850s and 1860s and were more likely than men to have novels accepted; by the end of the century men were more likely (and women less likely) to have novels accepted, even though men still submitted fewer novels (7-8). Tuchman's argument views the quest for literary success by authors in the second-half of the nineteenth century as a fight for power between men and women. My study of the decline of Trollope's reputation in this same time period suggests that aesthetic criteria were determined not just by sex but also by gender: as a man, Trollope suffers from being associated with “feminine” literary qualities, and thus the situation is more complicated than a straightforward battle between the sexes.

A survey of literary criticism of Trollope's novels from Barchester Towers onwards reveals that Trollope was held in highest critical esteem from the late 1850s through the mid 1860s; during this period he was seen as a possible successor to the literary throne of Dickens and Thackeray, but increasingly, as the 'sixties progressed, Trollope's literary reputation as a serious artist began to decline. Skilton summarizes the tone of critical commentary on Trollope in the 'seventies as one of condescension: “He was no longer thought of as a next-to-great novelist. … He clearly retained a fairly large public, but mainly as an author of circulating library fiction” (32). Related to this loss of critical prestige, in my opinion, is the growing tension that emerges in the same period (1860s to 1870s) between admiration for the “masculine” style and persona critics associate with the author of Barchester Towers and disparagement for the increasingly feminized associations made with his writings.² As with many other Victorian novelists, masculine associations seem to have some correlation with perceptions of literary merit.

Barchester Towers was the novel that first catapulted Trollope into the literary arena. This novel was only the second in what was to be a lengthy Barchester series, and the intense productivity of Trollope from 1856 until his death in 1884 (he wrote 47 novels in all) demands that any investigation of patterns in Trollope's reception also consider critical commentary on his later work.

Barchester Towers was published in 1857, and was, as Trollope states proudly in his Autobiography, “one of the novels which novel readers were called upon to read” (79). It was, in fact, Trollope's fifth novel; the first three had been unequivocally unsuccessful, and the fourth, The Warden, had received some, if fairly limited, critical attention.³ (Probably one of the reasons why The Warden did not attract wider attention was the fact that it was not a three-decker.) The appearance of Barchester Towers, however, proved to be the turning point in Trollope's writing career, both in critical attention and general popularity. As R. H. Super documents, 750 copies of Barchester Towers were published in 1857, of which 200 were bought by Mudie's, and these were followed by a one-volume edition in 1858 (80).⁴

Barchester Towers was reviewed in the following journals: the Westminster Review, the National Review, the Times, the Saturday Review, the Eclectic Review, the Examiner, the Leader, the Spectator, and the Athenaeum. Reviewers were unanimous in singling out Trollope's novel as one of the season's most distinguished offerings. The Examiner gives it “unquestionable rank among the few really well-written tales that every season furnishes” (308), while the Leader “cannot but describe it as uncommonly graphic and clever” (497). The National Review describes Barchester Towers as “undeniably one of the cleverest and best-written novels which have been published of late years” (425), and the usually recalcitrant Saturday Review devotes an entire article to it, calling it “a very clever book,” and admiring “its power and finish” (503). The Leader praises “the astonishing energy with which the author writes, the sharpness and concision of his style” (497).

Barchester Towers was thus taken seriously by reviewers, seen as intelligent, powerful, “clever,” and “well-written,” and in a class apart from ordinary novels. The Westminster Review provides the most explicitly gendered assessment, and highlights the implicit gender connotations of terms used in other reviews. In its opinion, Barchester Towers is “decidedly the cleverest novel of the season, and one of the most masculine delineations of modern life … that we have seen for many a day” (326). The Westminster Review praises Trollope for having written a “novel that men can enjoy” and for his “caustic and vigorous” qualities (327); it concludes by comparing Barchester Towers to Mrs. Oliphant's The Athelings, which is “in construction and execution altogether feminine” (327); it is perhaps unnecessary to add that Mrs. Oliphant's novel suffers from the comparison. The 1857 reviews of Barchester Towers are thus reminiscent of the strongly gendered assessments of Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend, praised for its “vigour” which was thought to be located in the book's content and style, seen as atypical of conventional novels, contrasted, by the Spectator, with “the sentimental woes and drawingroom distresses which form the staple of so much of our circulating library fiction” (877), and juxtaposed, to its credit, with inferior works by women writers.

Critics focus on, and seem to enjoy, what Jane Nardin terms the conservative comedy of Barchester Towers: “Barchester Towers' comedy of errors begins when a woman tries to think for herself” (33). Nardin argues that “the narrator's tone is … consistently misogynistic … and there is a lot of rib-digging, anti-feminist humor” (39). Trollope's novelistic persona in this work is clearly that of an orthodox middle-class Victorian gentleman as far as sex roles are concerned, as the resolution of the romance between Eleanor and Arabin indicates:

And now it remained to them each to enjoy the assurance of the other's love. And how great that luxury is. … And to a woman's heart how doubly delightful!

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper. They were not created to stretch forth their branches alone, and endure without protection the summer's sun and the winter's storm. Alone they but spread themselves upon the ground, and cower unseen in the dingy shade. But when they have found their firm supporters, how wonderful is their beauty. …

(239-40)

Many critics single out the characters of Mrs. Proudie and Madeline Vesey-Neroni for attention, the characters who are the source of so much of the novel's humour, along with the despicable clergyman Mr. Slope. The Westminster Review, for example, is intrigued by the battle for power between the Bishop and Mrs. Proudie, and is paternally anxious for Eleanor's dangerous independence to end in matrimony: “We are anxious for the widow, and long to have her havened out of her perilous widowhood in fast wedlock; man's great ambition to become a Bishop, and woman's wonderful art in ruling one, cannot fail to interest us exceedingly” (327). The Times also singles out for attention the conflict between the sexes, clearly identifying with the Bishop:

Perhaps the scenes between the Bishop and Mrs. Proudie are a little overdrawn, but, although highly coloured, they are not the less amusing delineations of human misery, as experienced by a man who permits himself not only to be henpecked in his private relations, but also to be in his public capacity under female domination. The poor bishop is not only assailed by his wife in the privacy of his dressing-room, he cannot receive a visitor without her permission.

(5)

Critics seem attracted by the treatment of relations between the sexes and by the conservative nature of the humour.

In her book on Victorian novelists, Mrs. Oliphant refers to both Trollope and Reade as “robust and manly figures,” writers who “will always stand together in the front of the second rank of Victorian novelists” (471-72). Leaving aside for the moment the vexed question of Trollope's rank among novelists, one of the more interesting aspects of criticism on Trollope is the way it tends to blur the boundaries between Trollope the man and Trollope the writer. Critics viewed Trollope's persona as extremely masculine, and as perfectly congruent with ideas about appropriate masculinity.⁵ They frequently compared Trollope's lifestyle, attitudes, persona, or beliefs with the details of his work. This delicate line between Trollope's public image and writing usually functioned to his advantage, giving him credibility and allowing reviewers to identify and sympathize with the writer as “one of us,” an educated and somewhat conservative mid-century gentleman.

Time, for example, writes admiringly of the similarities between Trollope's own conversation and the dialogue in his novels, and between his style as a hunter and his style as a writer:

As it is with the dialogue of Mr. Trollope's literary heroes and heroines, so is it with the conversation of Mr. Trollope himself. In each there is the same definiteness and direction; the same Anglo-Saxon simplicity. … As a writer … Mr. Trollope is precisely what he is, or used to be, as a rider across country. He sees the exact place at which he wants to arrive. He makes for it; and he determines to reach it as directly as possible. There may be obstacles, but he surmounts them.

(627)

David Cecil's remarks on Trollope, written in 1934, still echo Victorian discussion of the author. Like so many Victorian critics, he praises Trollope for being a “sensible man of the world”: “Like the other mid-Victorian gentlemen he enjoyed hunting and whist and a good glass of wine, admired gentle, unaffected, modest women, industrious, unaffected, manly men” (228).

Critics praised Trollope for his knowledge and experience of the world, and such compliments are always explicitly or implicitly based on gender. Time, for example, admires his “manly imagination” and admires the way Trollope “exemplifies and enforces” his ideas “with whatever suggests itself as suitable in the treasure-house of diversified knowledge and experience which he has assimilated” (632). The North British Review is impressed by Trollope as an experienced “man of the world”: “His books are the result of the experience of life, not of the studious contemplation of it. … While we read them we are made to share … the experience of a man who in going through his own daily business, has been brought in contact with an immense variety of people; who has looked at so much of the world as it came in his way to consider, with a great deal of keenness, kindness, and humour” (370).

While such experience of the world is theoretically open to both sexes, being a “man of the world” in Victorian society usually involves being male. Trollope is thought to reap literary advantages from his own experience as a Victorian gentleman. The North British Review, for example, believes that Trollope's combination of knowledge of the world with his subtlety allows him to outshine all female writers:

Mr. Trollope, with the delicate perception which he possesses, seizes upon the distinctive features which underlie so much apparent uniformity, and creates, or rather portrays, a character which is not the less amusing because it is perfectly commonplace. Some female writers have possessed this peculiar subtlety in still greater perfection, but then it is accompanied in Mr. Trollope with a masculine maturity and a knowledge of the world to which there is no kind of parallel in Miss Austen nor in any of her English sisters.

(375)

The ease with which critics are able to identify and sympathize with Trollope reveals how his masculine persona enhances his literary credibility. The Saturday Review is disarmed by the similarities between Trollope's own profile and that of its own readers and reviewers: “he always writes like a gentleman, and like an educated, observant, and kindly man” (1859, 368). The North British Review writes that Trollope “thoroughly understands, because he shares the thoughts and feelings of the majority of educated Englishmen” (370).

Occasionally, the intensity of Trollope's masculine image or persona creates a feeling of disjunction between the man and his work, as McMaster comments: “At social gatherings he was a bluff and blustering presence, and people were often astonished at the contrast between the delicacy of his novels and the aggressive assertiveness of their author: ‘The books, full of gentleness, grace and refinement; the writer of them bluff, loud, stormy, and contentious,’ wrote his friend W. P. Frith” (qtd. in McMaster 304).

When critics comment specifically on Trollope's writing, their impression of Trollope the man casts a constant shadow over their observations. As David Skilton remarks, “in general he is socially approved by the critics, even the fastidious Saturday naming him as ‘one of the few popular writers of the day who always write as a gentleman and a man of sense and principle should write’” (8). Writing “as a gentleman and a man of sense” is seen by most critics as one of Trollope's main talents, if not his central one. Henry James admires Trollope's “masculine” thought, stance, and judgment: “He writes, he feels, he judges like a man, talking plainly and frankly about many things, and is by no means destitute of a certain saving grace of coarseness” (99). James thus equates Trollope's straightforward lack of prudishness with masculinity.⁶

The clarity and plainness of Trollope's style are also complimented as a masculine trait. Geoffrey Tillotson, writing recently, states that Trollope's style is characterized by “a preference for monosyllables. It likes plain words” (56). It seems to be exactly this aspect of Trollope's style that strikes critics as masculine. Time, in 1879, expresses its enjoyment of the “definiteness and direction; the same Anglo-Saxon simplicity” (627) of Trollope's style. Paul Elmer More praises Trollope's “clear, manly, straightforward style” (91).

The North British Review admires Trollope's plots, and believes that they conjure up the delights of boyhood confrontations: in an 1864 article it calls them “simply a new version of the old fighting stories of our boyhood transferred to a far more delicate atmosphere; and we watch the struggle between Mrs. Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly with very much the same kind of anxiety as that with which we used to regard the engagements of the Deerslayer with the bloody Mingoes” (378).

The posthumous appearance of Trollope's An Autobiography was greeted by Richard Holt Hutton in the Spectator within an explicitly gendered framework:

The absolute frankness of An Autobiography is most characteristic of Mr. Trollope; and so is its unequalled—manliness we were going to say;—but we mean something both more and less than manliness, covering more than the daring of manliness and something less than the quietness or equanimity which we are accustomed to include in that term, so we may call it, its unequalled masculineness.”

(1377)

And David Cecil's reassessment of Trollope admires the “masculine friendliness” of Trollope's “tone of voice,” the “genial, leisurely masculinity” of Trollope's “vital and vigorous” humour, and the strength of his satire, which is not weakened “by diluting it in sentimental rosewater” (244-57).

Critics often attributed their enjoyment of Trollope, then, to his “masculine” qualities, and in many respects identification and discussion of Trollope's strengths revolved around male gendered connotations. The volatile nature of Trollope's reception, however, is more complicated and strange than the preceding discussion might imply. Despite critical perceptions of Trollope the man and Trollope the writer as intensely masculine, many critics, paradoxically, also felt that Trollope's writing had many feminine qualities. This perception grew stronger as the 1860s progressed. Occasionally such critics praised Trollope for the versatility and imagination that allowed him to exhibit supposedly feminine writing characteristics; more frequently, just as perceptions of masculine qualities in Barchester Towers raised his critical reputation, feminine associations with his later work, are, as I will show, partly responsible for critical attacks on Trollope, ranging from a refusal to take him seriously as a leading and important writer, to an affectionate dismissal as entertaining but slight.

Critics occasionally praised Trollope's juxtaposition of “masculine” and “feminine” qualities, as in the following 1882 remark by the Saturday Review:

He was in the best sense of the word a masculine man and writer, and yet he knew more of the feminine mind and nature than any author of his generation. … Among many signal merits of Mr. Trollope's genius was this—that he could handle at will and with equal success the masculine and the feminine nature and bent.

(755)

And the North British Review, in the 1864 article quoted above, argues that Trollope's ability to combine the “delicate perception” and “subtlety” of feminine writers with masculine strengths puts him in a unique category, one clearly above the reach of women writers.

More usually, however, Trollope's “feminine” qualities caused him to be taken less seriously. As the preceding remarks from the Saturday Review and the North British Review indicate, Trollope's apparent knowledge of the women and insight into their characters was widely remarked upon and seen as a feminine trait. The Saturday Review, praising his “extraordinary insight” into the “working of the feminine … mind” (755), recounts a story to this effect: during a dinner conversation, someone posed the following question to Trollope, “‘Mr. Trollope, how do you know what we women say to each other when we get alone in our rooms?’” (755). The Edinburgh Review seems perplexed at the apparent paradox in Trollope's ability to identify with young women in the creation of his numerous heroines: “Here we have a middle-aged or elderly gentleman worming himself into the hearts and confidences of young ladies, and identifying himself with the innermost workings of their minds; and a very remarkable phenomenon it is” (qtd. in Helling 81). Henry James, adopting a rather sinister predatorial image, also comments on Trollope's fondness for depicting young English women: “Trollope settled down steadily to the English girl; he took possession of her, and turned her inside out” (qtd. in Helling 82).

But this ambivalent admiration for the attention Trollope devoted to his heroines and the insight he seemed to have into their thoughts and feelings was also frequently the occasion for critical dismissals, as in the following 1869 comment from the Fortnightly Review: “[W]e admit Mr. Trollope's power in describing young ladies in love and in doubt. He knows English girls by heart … as the prose laureate of English girls of the better class, why should not Mr. Trollope record something else beside flirtations that end well?” (198)

Unlike Charles Reade, for example, who chose “epic” plots based on theme and action rather than character analysis, Trollope was more attracted to romance-based plots and character. Burns describes Reade as “consciously abjuring the techniques of Trollope and the domestic novelists (whose works he dismissed as ‘chronicles of small beer’) in an effort to create epic characters equal to what he conceived to be his epic theme” (159). It is quite clear that for Reade, Trollope's “chronicles of small beer” cannot possibly measure up to his “epic themes.” Trollope himself was quite candid about the importance of the romantic plot to his fiction. In his lecture on novels, “On English Prose Fiction As A Rational Amusement,” Trollope states boldly that novels “not only contain love stories, but they are written for the sake of the love stories” (Parrish 109). As Park Honan stated recently, “Trollope's women remind us that he had immense sentimental energy” (323).

Unfortunately for Trollope, being regarded as a “chronicler of young ladies' thoughts” was not conducive to being taken seriously as a novelist. The Fortnightly Review's praise of Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset reads like a response to such attacks on Trollope's work: “[In his] Last Chronicle of Barset [Mr. Trollope] has given us glimpses of a certain tragic and poetic power that place him far above any chronicler of young ladies' thoughts” (190). The implication clearly is that the thoughts of women, young women especially, are by definition frivolous and silly rather than interesting or serious.

One of the ways in which critics classified and evaluated Trollope was by defining his readership. Discussion about the sex of Trollope's readership led inevitably to evaluative statements about his merit as a writer. Barchester Towers was greeted by the Wesminster Review as “a novel that men can enjoy” (1857, 327), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning praised The Three Clerks as “a thoroughly man's book,” describing how her husband who normally did not like novels was “held” by Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, and The Three Clerks (qtd. in Smalley 64). As Trollope became increasingly popular, however, critics began to categorize his audience as both male and female, and, in some cases, as predominantly female. The Times, for example, in an 1859 article, argues that Trollope is suitable both for “patrons of Mudies” and for “thoughtful men”: “To those who are in the habit of reading novels it is unnecessary to say that Mr. Trollope is one of the most amusing of authors; and to those who in general prefer blue-books, statistics, and telegrams, but now and then indulge in the enormity of romance, we may report … that he is a ‘safe man’” (109). In a retrospective assessment of Trollope's readership, Michael Sadleir echoes this judgment, calling Trollope “at the same time … a novelist for the jeune fille and a most knowledgeable realist” (373).

Trollope himself, writing about the author's relationship to his readers, describes novel readers in primarily female terms, describing how they receive instruction in the ways of the world from the novelist:

The novelist creeps in closer than the schoolmaster. … He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration … and there she is taught—how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes. …

(qtd. in Helling 109)⁷

Presumably we can take these remarks as indicative of Trollope's sense of his implied and actual reader. Regardless of Trollope's own assessment of his readership, Trollope's popularity as a writer, and thus his status as a circulating library novelist, seems to be partly responsible for his reputation as a writer for young women.

The Saturday Review, for example, writes disparagingly of the popularity of Framley Parsonage's serialization in Cornhill Magazine: “[T]he author of Framley Parsonage is a writer who is born to make the fortune of circulating libraries. At the beginning of every month the new number of his book has ranked almost as one of the delicacies of the season; and no London belle dared to pretend to consider herself literary who did not know the very latest intelligence about the state of Lucy Robarts' heart and of Griselda Grantley's flounces” (1861, 452).⁸ It is perhaps only a small step from this kind of gendered assessment of readership to the pronouncement of the Literary World in 1884 that while Thackeray is a writer for men, Trollope is a writer for women. Trollope's view of life is, according to this periodical, “nearer what we may call the female view,” and thus, “we may say, on the whole, that Thackeray is written for men and women, and Trollope for women” (275). The Literary World goes on to praise Thackeray as “rooted in what is permanent on our nature” whereas Trollope's pictures are destined for only transient popularity.

Trollope's mass popularity and consequent association with circulating libraries constitute (along with his focus on romantic plots and interest in female characters) grounds for many Victorian critics to dismiss him as a serious writer, although it was common for such critics still to express their enjoyment of Trollope. In 1859 the Times places Trollope firmly in the category of circulating library writer by virtue of his popularity: “If Mudie were asked who is the greatest of living men, he would without one moment's hesitation say Mr. Anthony Trollope. … Trollope is, in fact, the most fertile, the most popular, the most successful author—that is to say, of the circulating library sort” (12; my emphasis). For the Times, however, Trollope's association with the circulating library raises its prestige rather than lowering Trollope's: “These novels are healthy and manly, and so long as Mr. Anthony Trollope is the prince of the circulating library our readers may rest assured that it is a very useful, very pleasant, and very honourable institution” (12). Trollope's continued association with Mudie's, however, eventually led to some critical dismissal. Being “the prince of the circulating library” was a somewhat dubious privilege.

Trollope was also criticized for being unimaginative or for having a mechanical kind of imagination that reproduces rather than creates. Trollope did receive praise for his ability to replicate Victorian society and life, but many Victorian critics saw this as essentially artless. The Saturday Review, for example, in 1861, states that “Mr. Trollope himself nowhere pretends to do more than to write down what he sees going on around him. He paints from the outside” (452). Trollope's reputation for superficiality of imagination, and a prolificacy of production that seemed incompatible with “true” genius or even artistry, had a derogatory influence on Trollope's literary reputation. Both accusations had certain feminine connotations or associations, as I will argue.

The North British Review (in 1864) and the Fortnightly Review (in 1869) reiterate the complaint of the Saturday Review about the apparent absence of imagination in Trollope's brand of realism. The North British Review suggests that Trollope disqualifies himself from the ranks of imaginative artists through his emphasis on realism: “he represents ordinary characters, and paints real life as it is, only omitting the poetry. The highest object of imaginative literature he neither attains nor aims at” (401). The Fortnightly Review argues that “commonplace” life is incompatible with high literary art: “The genteel public of the day may demand portraits of themselves … but no amount of skill can make common-place men and common-place incidents and common-place feelings fit subjects of high or true literary art” (196).⁹

These remarks all stem from similar assumptions about the components and attributes of great art: high art should not rely too much on everyday life, but should transcend these particulars by suggesting universals or by dealing only with the heroic or extraordinary. Perhaps inevitably in the divisions and hierarchies of Victorian culture, rigidly schematized according to gender, such critiques and adjectives assume gender associations; the critical objections to Trollope cited above correspond closely to the kind of critical attacks levelled at women's writing. “Masculine” was identified with high-culture, male readers, originality, power and truth, whereas “feminine” was associated with popular culture, female readers, and stereotypically female qualities such as lack of originality, weakness of intellect, and feebleness of ideas. Trollope's literary reputation, from the early 1860s onwards, suffered from being feminized, from being burdened with the kind of critiques that were more usually bestowed upon popular women writers.

In 1867 and 1868, Trollope conducted a literary experiment producing two novels, Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, that he published anonymously. The London Review responded thus to Linda Tressel on May 30, 1868: “We are not aware that Nina Balatka was ever said to be the writing of a woman … but the appearance of Linda Tressel almost settles the point. The heroic fortitude, the simple frankness, and maidenly honor of Nina Balatka were the attributes of a creation which might have arisen in the mind of a male artist; but Linda Tressel seems to us altogether a woman's woman” (qtd. in Smalley 20). This interesting observation sheds some light on what was perceived as intrinsically yet paradoxically feminine in the character portrayals in Trollope's other novels.

The world of Trollope's novels was a very recognizable one for his readers, focusing as it did primarily on genteel middle-class Victorian relationships in society. And while domestic realism was clearly not the exclusive preserve of women writers, it was, as Showalter reminds us, seen as their most appropriate domain: “By the 1840s women writers had adopted a variety of popular genres, and were specializing in novels of fashionable life, education, religion, and community, which Vineta Colby subsumes under the heading ‘domestic realism’” (20). Tuchman argues that women writers were associated “with the least-admired aspects of novels: the details of personal, emotional, and everyday life” (“When the Prevalent” 154).

Women writers were thought to specialize in domestic realism because it required less imaginative and intellectual effort or strength, allowing them to passively regurgitate the details of life they saw around them. Lack of imagination was seen as one of the chief limitations of women writers for many Victorian critics. R. H. Hutton, in an 1858 essay for the North British Review, argues this position: “It may seem a harsh and arbitrary dictum that our lady novelists do not usually succeed in the field of imagination. … Yet we are fully convinced that this is the main deficiency of feminine genius. It can observe, it can recombine, it can delineate, but it cannot trust itself further; it cannot leave the world of characteristic traits and expressive manner” (qtd. in Helsinger 52-53). G. H. Lewes, in his essay “The Lady Novelists,” also argues that women's writing is characterized by a close adherence to domestic experience rather than inspired by intellect or imagination: “The domestic experience which forms the bulk of women's knowledge finds an appropriate form in novels” (Westminster Review 133). One writer in 1858 held that women writers gravitated towards unimaginative portraits of everyday life due to their intellectual short-comings:

In many ways, the natural limitations of feminine power are admirably adapted to the standard of fiction held up as the true model of a feminine novelist in the last century. It was then thought sufficient to present finished sketches of character, just as it appeared under the ordinary restraints of society; while the deeper passions and spiritual impulses, which are the springs of all the higher dramas of real life, were, at most, only allowed so far to suffuse the narrative as to tinge it with the excitement necessary for a novel.

(North British Review 472-73)

It is apparent that the kind of criticisms directed towards Trollope's supposed lack of imagination and focus on domestic realism were also characteristic criticisms aimed at women's writing. In my judgment, Trollope is taken less seriously as an artist because of his apparently “feminized” attributes as a writer in these respects. As Tuchman argues, “by 1870 men of letters were using the term high culture to set off novels they admired from those they deemed run-of-the-mill” (3). Tuchman analyzes the readers' reports for the publishing house of Macmillan, run by Morley, and believes that the readers viewed “high-culture” in terms of gender.

As Morley and his successors tried to distinguish and define the high-culture novel through their in-house reviews, they insistently identified men with high culture and women with mass or popular culture, although they did not use these twentieth-century terms. They identified men with ideas capable of having an impact upon the mind—with activity and the production orientation associated with high culture. Women were identified with mass audiences, passive entertainment, and … popular culture.

(78)

Trollope, then, is condemned by many Victorian critics for choosing to focus on “common-place incidents and common-place feelings,” for ignoring the “highest object of imaginative literature,” for being uncomfortably close in popularity and subject-matter to female “circulating-library” novelists, although his skill and wide experience of life make him, for many critics, superior to such “second-rate” writers. An important testimony to these kinds of associations is the Saturday Review's conflation of feminized content, commercial popularity, imaginative weakness, and artistic inferiority in the following 1863 critique of Rachel Ray: “There is a brisk market for descriptions of the inner life of young women, and Mr. Trollope is the chief agent in supplying the market. … Mr. Trollope … has taught himself to turn out a brick that does almost without straw, and is a very good saleable brick of its kind” (qtd. in Skilton 54).

Trollope's precarious position as a serious Victorian writer was also endangered by his productivity. His ability to write so many books, one after the other, was seen as suspicious, tantamout to a rejection of high aesthetic seriousness and to an adoption of a money-motivated and formulaic approach. From 1857 to 1869, twenty reviews of different Trollope works appeared in the Athenaeum, twenty-four in the Saturday Review, and twenty-four in the Spectator (Skilton 12). Of course other Victorian writers such as Dickens, Mrs. Oliphant, or Charlotte Yonge were also prolific, but Trollope is unusual, unique even, not only for the sheer quantity of novels he wrote, but for his own outspoken and gleeful pride in his production. As he put it in his Autobiography:

And so I end the record of my literary performances,—which I think are more in amount that the works of any other living English author. If any English authors not living have written more … I do not know who they are. I find that … I have published much more than twice as much as Carlyle. I have also published considerably more than Voltaire, even including his letters. … I am still living and may add to the pile. … It will not, I am sure, be thought that, in making my boast as to quantity, I have endeavoured to lay claim to any literary excellence. … But I do lay claim to whatever merit should be accorded to me for persevering diligence in my profession.

(253-55)

Although men, such as G. P. R. James and G. W. M. Reynolds, as well as women wrote prolifically and for commercial reasons, women in general were thought to be more susceptible to rapid and unskilled writing, a prejudice that goes back to the eighteenth-century idea of “scribbling women.” Greg in his essay “False Morality of Lady Novelists” states that “there are vast numbers of lady novelists, for much the same reason that there are vast numbers of sempstresses”: “Every educated lady can handle a pen tant bien que mal: all such, therefore, take to writing—and to novel-writing—as the kind which requires least special qualification and the least severe study, and also as the only kind which will sell” (qtd. in Ewbank 11). Lewes protests in an 1865 essay against the “presumptuous facility” of “indolent novelists,” and implies that women novelists are especially guilty (Nadel 361). Dallas felt that “women have a talent for personal discourse and familiar narrative, which, when properly controlled, is a great gift, although too frequently it degenerates into a social nuisance” (qtd. in Showalter 82). Showalter argues that women's writing was seen as effortless, an extension of their natural role and instinct: “Such an approach [i.e., that of Dallas] was particularly attractive because it implied that women's writing was as artless and effortless as birdsong, and therefore not in competition with the more rational male eloquence” (82).

Trollope was vulnerable to similar accusations because of his enormous productivity. Many critics felt that the sheer volume and rapidity of his literary production meant that the works had to be produced “naturally,” without undue intellectual exertion. His notorious statements about writing in his Autobiography only served to accentuate existing distrust and disregard for his status as a literary figure.¹⁰ Trollope was perhaps more vocal about the quantity of his work and the financial rewards that followed than any other Victorian figure; Payn writes that “[h]e took almost a savage pleasure in demolishing the theory of ‘inspiration,’ which has caused the world to deny his ‘genius’” (167). Trollope was thus dangerously vulnerable to the kinds of critical attacks and associations normally connected with the productivity and literary status of women writers. McMaster attributes negative and ambivalent responses to Trollope to the rate of his literary production: “Trollope's enormous productivity has had much to do with a patronizing dismissal of his work by some critics and a rather apologetic attitude adopted even by his admirers” (317).

Victorian critics were preoccupied with classifying Trollope as a major or second-rate writer. Despite their initial enthusiasm for Barchester Towers and its immediate successors in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and despite their own enjoyment of Trollope's work, many had reservations about Trollope's status as a leading novelist who would rank with Dickens or Thackeray. Skilton attributes part of the critical ambivalence to a degree of insecurity about what the “rules” were for excellence in the relatively new genre of novel: “We see the reviewers confronted by the problem of whether or not to regard him as a great novelist, and of how to establish in the first place what constitutes greatness in a genre in which they are still not at home, critically speaking” (xiii). (Dickens and Thackeray were often taken as the two “masters” against whom other contenders were measured (resurrecting the Richardson/Fielding opposition of the previous century), and of course such a preconception or standard tended to somewhat unfairly influence critical vision and judgment, making it harder to see a novelist in terms of his or her unique strengths.)

The Times obituary of Trollope had no reservation about placing him in the second-rank of novelists, along with Austen and Gaskell who wrote “realistic studies of English domestic life” (qtd. in MacDonald 113). The Saturday Review, however, perhaps remembering their previous partiality to Trollope, rose to Trollope's defense, objecting vehemently to critics who associated him with second-ranked authors like Austen: “it is only ‘the stupid critic’ that has placed Jane Austen and Trollope ‘together in the second rank’” (qtd. in Fielding 434).¹¹

Olmsted and Welch suggest that critical ambivalence towards Trollope really began in the 1860s, and argue that the most interesting aspect of Trollope's critical reputation has been the general reader's refusal to be influenced by the often negative remarks of the critics: “Trollope's readers have for the most part been going it alone since the 1860s when writers for the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review first began to express their irritation at Trollope's ‘superstitious adherence to facts’ and at what Henry James called ‘the inveteracy with which he just eludes being really serious’” (xi).

It is not coincidental that both of the obituaries mentioned above juxtapose Trollope with Jane Austen. It was, in fact, a critical commonplace to compare Trollope with Austen. As Smalley states, “both stopped short of the depth of vision or the high seriousness that were essential to art of a more elevated sort. Both were, however, wonderfully amusing” (14). Smalley's summary conveys the sense that domestic realism was seen as somehow incompatible with high-serious art, as well as the way in which Trollope's popularity was actually detrimental to his stature as an artist. Smalley goes on to imply a similar point when he states that Victorian critics regarded Trollope as “a popular novelist delightful to read” rather than as a “genius” (26).

Implicit in the idea that Trollope was “popular” and that he was “delightful to read” is the reservation that he was too accessible to the ordinary novel-reader to be taken very seriously. Stephen's dismissal of Trollope in 1901 is particularly telling in this respect: “We can see plainly enough what we must renounce in order to enjoy Trollope. We must cease to bother ourselves about art. … We must not desire brilliant epigrams suggesting familiarity with aesthetic doctrines or theories of the universe. A brilliant modern novelist is not only clever, but writes for clever readers” (180). Sadleir, in 1927, makes an equally revealing observation with retrospective insight: “The initial obstacle to a sober-minded definition of Trollope's novels is that they provide a sensual rather than an intellectual experience” (366). Again, I would argue that perceptions like these have implicit gender associations—clever, educated, and intellectual were adjectives more commonly associated with male writers and readers in Victorian culture, and even though Stephen and Sadleir's comments are from the early twentieth-century, they sum up the nebulous qualities of Trollope's work and image that complicated the assessment and ranking of Trollope by Victorian critics from the 1860s until his death in 1884.

Frederic Harrison's comparison of Trollope with Austen in 1895 explicitly feminizes Trollope:

Now Trollope reproduces for us that simplicity, unity, and ease of Jane Austen, whose facile grace flows on like the sprightly talk of a charming woman, mistress of herself and sure of her hearers. This uniform ease, of course, goes with the absence of all the greatest qualities of style; absence of any passion, poetry, mystery, or subtley. He never rises, it is true, to the level of the great masters of language. But, for the ordinary incidents of life amongst well-bred and well-to-do men and women of the world, the form of Trollope's tales is almost as well adapted as the form of Jane Austen.

(208)

These remarks demonstrate the association of artlessness so many nineteenth-century critics had with women's writing, the identification of domestic subject-matter as somehow incompatible with the “great masters,” and the way Trollope's reputation suffers from being associated with “the sprightly talk” and “facile grace” of a “charming woman.” Brophy, writing as late as 1968, reiterates the Trollope/Austen comparison, feminizing Trollope even more strongly than Harrison: “Indeed Trollope is that nice, maundering spinster lady with a poke bonnet and a taste for cottagey gardens whom superficial readers thought they had got hold of when they had in fact got hold of the morally sabre-toothed Jane Austen” (64).

Trollope's so-called “masculine” characteristics were largely responsible for the critical approval he did receive, for Barchester Towers for example, and the “feminine” characteristics of his writing (his subject-matter, his interest in and insight into female characters, his imagination or lack thereof, his productivity, his popularity, his readership) are partly responsible for his critical dismissal. In the mid and latter part of his career, Trollope was often associated with the less prestigious feminine qualities and connotations; as I have shown, critical ambivalence began creeping in during the mid 1860s, and was fairly solidly in place from, and after, 1870.

The timing of Trollope's critical fall from grace coincides, then, with the rise of a critical poetics that increasingly desired to distinguish “high art” from “popular art,” often along gender lines. Tuchman argues that “[b]y 1870 men of letters were using the term high culture to set off novels they admired from those they deemed run-of-the-mill” (3). And in 1880 the Athenaeum laments that “Mr. Trollope is not an artist according to the modern school of high art” (qtd. in Skilton 33). As we have seen, the criteria defining “high art” rigorously exclude the feminized qualities so commonly applied to Trollope from the late 1860s onwards, and these gender connotations play a major, even a central role, in Trollope being “edged out.”

The volatility of Trollope's reputation has never been satisfactorily accounted for, though critics like Skilton, Smalley, Olmsted, and Welch provide comprehensive surveys of its bizarre twists and turns. Ruth ApRoberts attributes this critical failure to “come to grips with his work” to the inappropriate application of “old theories” of art, such as modernist premises and “new critical” frameworks: “Of all English novelists Trollope seems to be the perfect example of the kind least served by our old theories; and for this very reason, to come to grips with his work may help us towards a new and more workable theory” (11). Contemporary twentieth-century critics overlook the issue of gender in the decline of Trollope's reputation, probably assuming that Trollope's sex guarantees him safety from any sexual double standard that might exist. Ironically though, my argument does not contradict but supplements or complicates conventional accounts of Trollope's fall from “high art,” since the very reasons most commonly used to account for this decline—Trollope's productivity and lack of superior imagination, changing literary tastes—themselves have gender connotations which have been ignored in discussions of Trollope. While it would be overstating the case to claim that associations with gender constitute the sole cause of the decline in Trollope's reputation, a “new more workable theory” that would help us understand Trollope should, I think, take into account the previously invisible and overlooked relation of nineteenth-century gender associations with ideas of literary value and high art, as applied to Trollope's novels. Being a “Queen” of the Victorian circulating library was problematic for any writer when popular and high art began to diverge, but particularly problematic if the author happened to be male.

Notes

1. Nardin's He Knew She Was Right is the only explicitly feminist work I am aware of in this field, and it is devoted to textual study rather than to reception considerations.

2. This article argues that gender associations contributed to the deterioration of Trollope's critical reputation. Contemporary twentieth-century critics do not address the issue of gender in this respect; they attribute Trollope's loss of literary prestige to changing literary tastes, to the incompatibility of his productivity with the idea of romantic genius, and to the sense that his subject-matter and his treatment of it were not indicative of superior imagination or profundity, but the gendered connotations of these aesthetic criteria are not discussed. See Macdonald's Anthony Trollope, Smalley's “Introduction” in Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, and Olmsted and Welch's Introduction in The Reputation of Trollope for surveys of the decline of Trollope's reputation. For a general discussion of changes in aesthetic and literary critical ideals from the mid to the late nineteenth century, Stang's The Theory of the Novel in England is a helpful source; Skilton's Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries discusses how Victorian literary critical conventions about imagination, subject-matter, and character depiction affected Trollope's reception and reputation.

3. Trollope's first four novels were as follows: The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848), La Vandee (1850), and The Warden (1855).

4. In 1858, Mudie advertised fifty books, but bought most copies of the following four novels: Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago (1200 copies); Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late To Mend (1000 copies); Charlotte Yonge's Dynevor Terrace (1000 copies); and 900 copies of Charlotte Yonge's Heartsease (Haight 2: 467). Compared to such numbers, Mudie's order for 200 copies of Barchester Towers may seem like paltry stuff, but when we remember that the four books above were Mudie's top orders for a year, and that Barchester Towers was really the first novel of Trollope's that attracted wide critical notice, 200 seems like a respectable number.

5. Such comments are extremely common in Trollope reviews: a few examples are Dallas's article in the Times, May 23, 1859, the June 1864 article in North British Review, and the Saturday Review article of 1882. The Times calls Trollope's writing style “healthy and manly,” and “cordially sympathizes” with his “manly aversion to melodramatic art” (12). The North British Review finds that “the whole tone and habit of mind implied in these [Trollope's] novels is that of a man of activity and business, rather than of a man of letters” (370). The Saturday Review says that he was “a masculine man and writer” (755).

6. Trollope's disagreements with his publisher over the supposed vulgarity of Barchester Towers's language (“fat stomach” was changed to “deep chest,” and “foul breathing” was eliminated by Longman's objection) are well known, and are documented with much mischief and wit in the Autobiography. In an 1856 letter, Trollope responded thus to Longman's accusations of “indecency” in Barchester Towers “[N]othing would be more painful to me than to be considered an indecent writer. … I do not think that I can in utter ignorance have committed a volume of indecencies” (The Letters of Anthony Trollope 2: 47). In an 1860 letter to George Smith, Trollope declared ruefully that he would “never forget a terrible and killing correspondence which I had with W. Longman because I would make a clergyman kiss a lady whom he proposed to marry—He, the clergyman I mean; not he W. Longman” (Letters 1: 117).

7. This passage proceeds to mention male readers, but devotes more primacy and space to their female counterparts.

8. The sustained and ambivalent attention dedicated to Trollope by the Saturday Review is one of the most interesting aspects of Trollope's reception history. Trollope identified the Saturday Review in his Autobiography as one of the three most important British periodicals for contemporary literary criticism; the other two were The Times and the Spectator. The particular stance, approach, and readership of the Saturday Review self-consciously represented University-educated men, and in fact the Saturday Review often interpreted its position as a call to arms to defend elite literary culture against popular invasions. As a result, the tone and content of Saturday Review literary criticism is often more predictable and constant than that of other Victorian periodicals. The extent to which the individual perspective of the reviewer or critic became submerged by the journal's persona is evident in a remark by Leslie Stephen, who, going through the Saturday Review files years later, is unable to identify his own work: “I had unconsciously adopted the tone of my colleagues, and, like some inferior organisms, taken the colouring of my ‘environment’” (qtd. in Smalley 21). The Saturday Review found itself in an uncomfortable predicament over Trollope, however: it identified with Trollope as a fellow middle-to-upper-class educated Victorian man, but objected to Trollope's heretical lapse into behaviour and characteristics which did not accord with its high-culture position, and which, as I argue, had become feminized. Consequently the many Saturday Review articles on Trollope show some sign of emotional intensity and conflict, and sometimes contradict each other, as is evident from the excerpts quoted in this chapter, particularly if Trollope's obituary is compared to the journal's earlier commentary on Trollope.

9. The second chapter of Skilton's Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries “Critical Concerns of the Sixties: Tragedy and Imagination” situates criticism of Trollope's supposed lack of imagination in the context of the 1860s: “The better and more favourable of Trollope's contemporary critics … found various ways of accounting for why he fell short of artistic greatness. All their explanations amount in effect to the diagnosis that he lacked ‘imagination’, that his subjects were mundane, his treatment of them plain, and that in short he was an ‘observer’ or ‘photographer’ rather than an inventive artist” (45).

10. A. L. Rowse's essay, “Trollope's Autobiography” in Trollope Centenary Essays (ed. John Halperin) provides more background on how Trollope's Autobiography affected his reputation.

11. As Fielding explains in “Trollope and the Saturday Review,” the Saturday Review “liked Trollope because, as they say, he wrote in ‘the style of a gentleman’” (431). Fielding goes on to state that “the Saturday Review did enjoy Trollope in spite of their apparently hostile criticism, which was sometimes actually hostile” (432). Skilton sees the Saturday Review as leaning more towards the critical side of ambivalence, primarily because of Trollope's popularity: “Conscious of their social and intellectual superiority, the university men on the Saturday felt a deep scorn for any popular phenomenon, in literature, religion, dress or politics” (53). Skilton summarizes the Saturday's attack on the 1866 The Belton Estates thus: “Trollope, says the reviewer, is like an artist who year after year submits to the Royal Academy a painting of a donkey between two bundles of hay. He has published no fewer than three novels in the past twelve months, all concerning someone who is hesitating between two loves, and the only difference between them is that the ‘expression of the donkey's eye may vary a little’” (55-56).

Works Cited

Anonymous reviews and articles are alphabetized by title of the periodical.

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Rev. of Barchester Towers. Athenaeum 1544 (30 May 1857): 689-90.

Brophy, Brigid, Michael Levey, and Charles Osborne. “The Warden.” In Fifty Years of English and American Literature We Could Do Without. London: Stein and Day, 1968.

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Rev. of Barchester Towers. Eclectic Review July 1857: 54-59.

Ewbank, Inga-Stina. Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters As Early-Victorian Female Novelists. London: Arnold, 1966.

Rev. of Barchester Towers. Examiner 16 May 1857: 308.

Fielding, K. J. “Trollope and the Saturday Review.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37, 3 (Dec. 1982): 430-42.

“Mr. Anthony Trollope's Novel.” Fortnightly Review 5, xxvi (1 Feb. 1869): 188-98.

Haight, Gordon, ed. The George Eliot Letters. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954.

Halperin, John, ed. Trollope Centenary Essays. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

Harrison, Frederic. “Anthony Trollope's Place in Literature.” In Studies In Early Victorian Literature. London: Arnold, 1895.

Helling, Rafael. A Century of Trollope Criticism. 1956. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1967.

Helsinger, Elizabeth K., Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, eds. The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883. Vol. 3. Literary Issues. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Honan, Park. “Trollope After A Century.” Contemporary Review. Dec. 1982: 318-23.

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Irwin, Mary Leslie. Anthony Trollope: A Bibliography. New York: Wilson, 1926.

James, Henry. “Anthony Trollope.” In Partial Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1886, 97-133.

Rev. of Barchester Towers. Leader 23 May 1857: 497.

“About Novels.” Literary World 15 (23 Aug. 1884): 275.

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McMaster, Juliet. “Anthony Trollope.” In Nadel, Ira, and William Fredeman, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 21. Victorian Novelists Before 1885. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1983.

More, Paul Elmer. “My Debt To Trollope.” In The Demon of the Absolute. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1928.

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Nardin, Jane. “Conservative Comedy and the Women of Barchester Towers.” Studies in the Novel 18, 4 (Winter 1986): 381-94.

———. He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. Carbondale: U of Illinois P, 1989.

“Mr. Trollope's Novels.” National Review 7 (Oct. 1858): 416-35.

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“Mr. Trollope's Novels.” North British Review 40 (June 1864): 369-401.

Oliphant, Margaret. The Victorian Age of English Literature. Philadelphia: David Mckay, 1892.

Omsted, John Charles, and Jeffrey Egan Welch. The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography, 1925-1975. New York: Garland, 1978.

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Payn, James. Some Literary Recollections. New York: Harper, 1884.

Reade, Charles. It Is Never Too Late To Mend. 1856. Boston: Grolier, 1943.

Sadleir, Michael. Trollope: A Commentary. 1927. Rpt. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1947.

Rev. of Barchester Towers. Saturday Review 3 (30 May 1857): 503-04.

Rev. of The Bertrams. Saturday Review 7 (26 March 1859): 368-69.

“Framley Parsonage.” Saturday Review 9 (4 May 1861): 451-52.

“Mr. Anthony Trollope.” Saturday Review 54 (9 Dec. 1882): 755-56.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

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“Reade's It Is Never Too Late To Mend.” Spectator 29 (16 Aug. 1856): 877-78.

Rev. of Barchester Towers. Spectator 30 (16 May 1857): 525-26.

Stang, Richard. The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870. New York: Columbia UP, 1959.

Stephen, Leslie. “Anthony Trollope.” In Studies of a Biographer, Vol. 4. London: Putnam's Sons, 1907, 156-60.

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Super, R. H. The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1988.

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“New Novels.” Times 13 Aug. 1857: 5.

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———. Barchester Towers. 1857. Ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

———. The Letters of Anthony Trollope. 2 volumes. Ed. N. John Hall. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1983.

———. The Warden. Ed. N. John Hall. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Tuchman, Gaye, and Nina E. Fortin. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.

———. “When The Prevalent Don't Prevail. Male Hegemony and the Victorian Novel.” Conflict and Consensus. Ed. Walter W. Powell and Richard Robbins. New York: The Free Press, 1984. 139-58.

[G. H. Lewes] “The Lady Novelists.” Westminster Review, n.s. ii (1852), 129-41.

“Contemporary Literature: Belles Lettres.” Westminster Review 68 (Oct. 1857): 326-27.