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He Knew She Was Right
The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope
Jane Nardin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Trollope’s mother, wife, and a friend he loved platonically most of his life provided him three very different views of the Victorian woman. And, according to Jane Nardin, they were responsible for the dramatic shift in his treatment of women in his novels.

This is the first book in Sandra Gilbert’s Ad Feminam series to examine a male author. Nardin initially analyzes the novels Trollope wrote from 1855 to 1861, in which male concerns are central to the plot and women are angelic heroines, submissive and self-sacrificing. Even the titles of his novels written during this period are totally male oriented. The Three Clerks, Doctor Thorne, and The Bertrams all refer to men. Shortly after meeting Kate Field, Trollope wrote Orley Farm, which refers to the estate an angry woman steals from her husband and which marks a change in the attitudes toward women evident in his novels.

His next four books, The Small House at Allington, Rachel Ray, Can You Forgive Her?, and Miss Mackenzie, prove that women’s concerns had become central in his writing. Nardin examines specific novels written from 1861 to 1865 in which Trollope, with increasing vigor, subverts the conventional notions of gender that his earlier novels had endorsed.

Nardin argues that his novels written after 1865 and often recognized as feminist are not really departures but merely refinements of attitudes Trollope exhibited in earlier works.

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front cover of Romanticism and Anthony Trollope
Romanticism and Anthony Trollope
A Study in the Continuities of Nineteenth-Century Literary Thought
L. J. Swingle
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Most people who study Romanticism suppose the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope has little or nothing to do with Romantic literary thought, except perhaps opposition to it. Most people who study Trollope agree. Romanticism and Anthony Trollope argues that these suppositions are mistaken, reflecting erroneous ideas about Romanticism or about Trollope—or perhaps about both.L. J. Swingle invites reexamination of popular assumptions about the nature of nineteenth-century literary art, generally, and, especially, reconsideration of the idea that Romanticism and what is called Victorian Realism are fundamentally antithetical. Romantic writers and Trollope share basic assumptions about how human beings think; and, as a result, they also share uneasy notions about the substantiality of human relationships, particularly marriage. Swingle shows that our understanding of Trollope is clarified and enriched when we think about his work in relation to Romantic literary art; and, as well, it shows that we gain a better understanding of Romanticism by thinking about it in connection withTrollope. At a time when the resurrection of Trollope’s writings is increasingly common and popular enthusiasm for his work is high, this book will be especially welcomed. Romanticists, students of fiction, literary historians, and people working in nineteenth-century cultural studies will find its insights important and provocative, leading not only to a revaluation of Trollope’s work but to a rethinking of our stereotypes of Romanticism.
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