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Trollope
Victoria Glendinning provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope, placing emphasis on family, particularly on his relationship with his mother. But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field.
The author does say that some of it is imagined and she cannot prove what she says happened or is said, but she is "sure of it" herself.
The author does say that some of it is imagined and she cannot prove what she says happened or is said, but she is "sure of it" herself.
551 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
13 people are currently reading
257 people want to read
About the author
Victoria Glendinning
44 books54 followersBritish biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.
Glendinning read modern languages at Oxford and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.
She has been married three times, the second to Irish writer, lawyer and editor Terence de Vere White, who died of Parkinson's disease in 1994.
Glendinning read modern languages at Oxford and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.
She has been married three times, the second to Irish writer, lawyer and editor Terence de Vere White, who died of Parkinson's disease in 1994.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 11, 2016
A bit of a tome this one, so couldn't lug it everywhere. But very enjoyable, gave me a better idea of the many-layered man that Trollope was. A loud, awkward man, perceived either as 'vulgar' or 'honest and straightforward' depending on the person, or sometimes the time and place. Behind that, the anxious boy 'abandoned' for some years by his energetic mother, left with his depressed and angry father.
Somehow Trollope fitted in a full time job with writing a huge amount, and hunting whenever he could. An outsider as a child and a young man, he gradually gained entry to the literary circles of London, numbering Thackeray, George Eliot and John Everett Millais among his friends.
His extended family are also interesting, especially his bossy brother Tom and his wives. Am determined to read more of his books now.
Somehow Trollope fitted in a full time job with writing a huge amount, and hunting whenever he could. An outsider as a child and a young man, he gradually gained entry to the literary circles of London, numbering Thackeray, George Eliot and John Everett Millais among his friends.
His extended family are also interesting, especially his bossy brother Tom and his wives. Am determined to read more of his books now.
August 23, 2019
Readable amiable biography that covers AT's life and relates it to his writing. Very pleasant reading and Glendinning is not afraid to express her opinions about the novels and his other work. This is a thoughtful history which does make you want to reread the Palliser books, but can a biography of Trollope be life-changing? I think not. However, did you know he was a a good friend of George Eliot?
October 31, 2021
Sometimes it is a good idea to start writing a review as amazement crests in the conscious mind. That is how I feel in merely part one: startled by my interest, stunned that the sundry school systems attended by Anthony and older brother Tom (like Winchester) were so lacking if not downright sinister, touched by Anthony Trollope’s mother’s love and eccentricity and his father’s inability to elicit love or respect. I feel awed at the detail provided by this family of writers. I have seen all of Trollope’s novels set to film but now I feel I must read them all. Glendinning seems to know exactly what morsels to offer next.
July 10, 2010
This biography offers much in the way of describing everyday Victorian life and manners, but Glendinning's methodology for uncovering the "real" Anthony Trollope--reading his life from his fiction--is questionable at best, and useless at worst (several times she says the equivalent of, "I can't prove this incident in his novel actually happened to Trollope himself, but I know it did"). It does make me look forward to reading Trollope's novels, though.
December 27, 2025
I almost never read two major biographies of the same person, and I have never before read two back to back. But after reading N. John Hall’s biography of Anthony Trollope (published in 1991), I saw Victoria Glendinning’s biography (published in 1992) on the library shelf and read it as well. Both are deeply researched academic biographies. I enjoyed them both, but for a person who wants to read only one, I would recommend N. John Hall’s.
In a nutshell, here are the differences. Hall focuses more on the public life of Anthony Trollope. He discusses Trollope’s Civil Service career in more detail, and he emphasizes the business end of Trollope’s writing career—how and by whom the various books were published, the financial contracts, etc. Not much is known of Trollope’s marriage or his domestic life, so Hall has little to say about it. Hall does not discuss the novels—except to put them in biographical context—but he does discuss in considerable detail Trollope’s voluminous but little known travel books. Hall does not have an interpretive angle; he is content to try to summarize Trollope’s very busy, crowded life.
Victoria Glendinning is interested in piercing beneath the public Trollope. She is interested in Trollope’s marriage, in his views about domestic matters, his relationships with his mother and siblings--and with other women. She is interested in his psychology and his depressive periods. But there is little information on any of that. Thus, Glendinning reads Trollope’s vast oeuvre to discover clues. Of course most of that oeuvre is fiction, and the “authorial voice” of his novels is still—at least to some degree—a fictional voice. I don’t mean to suggest that Glendinning goes on irresponsible fishing expeditions. Her fictional analyses are insightful. She has also read more widely about Trollope’s historically forgotten contemporaries than Hall, and thus establishes some enhanced cultural contexts. (She is particularly good, for example, in discussing the nature of English gentlmen’s clubs and evolving ideas of female fashion.) But in the end, Glendinning’s biography, though enjoyable and an impressive piece of scholarship, is a little too speculative for me.
And yet, I’m glad I read it.
In a nutshell, here are the differences. Hall focuses more on the public life of Anthony Trollope. He discusses Trollope’s Civil Service career in more detail, and he emphasizes the business end of Trollope’s writing career—how and by whom the various books were published, the financial contracts, etc. Not much is known of Trollope’s marriage or his domestic life, so Hall has little to say about it. Hall does not discuss the novels—except to put them in biographical context—but he does discuss in considerable detail Trollope’s voluminous but little known travel books. Hall does not have an interpretive angle; he is content to try to summarize Trollope’s very busy, crowded life.
Victoria Glendinning is interested in piercing beneath the public Trollope. She is interested in Trollope’s marriage, in his views about domestic matters, his relationships with his mother and siblings--and with other women. She is interested in his psychology and his depressive periods. But there is little information on any of that. Thus, Glendinning reads Trollope’s vast oeuvre to discover clues. Of course most of that oeuvre is fiction, and the “authorial voice” of his novels is still—at least to some degree—a fictional voice. I don’t mean to suggest that Glendinning goes on irresponsible fishing expeditions. Her fictional analyses are insightful. She has also read more widely about Trollope’s historically forgotten contemporaries than Hall, and thus establishes some enhanced cultural contexts. (She is particularly good, for example, in discussing the nature of English gentlmen’s clubs and evolving ideas of female fashion.) But in the end, Glendinning’s biography, though enjoyable and an impressive piece of scholarship, is a little too speculative for me.
And yet, I’m glad I read it.
November 30, 2019
A wonderful and very comprehensive biography of one of the great Victorian writers, Anthony Trollope. His career at the Post Office (with extensive travelling in both Europe and the rest of the world), his struggles to get his novels published, his relations with family and friends; and all those little snippets of his life that found their way into his novels and other writings. A collection of photos completes this book.
July 24, 2023
Superb biography. Really gives you a sense of the man and the writer. Recommended.
June 22, 2021
Anthony Trollope, a Victorian so solid as a man and an author, at a first glance but a man full of sensitivity, a man who had a late start in life, an unhappy school life (Harrow!), a less than happy impoverished childhood with a depressed father and a formidable but removed mother, a late bloomer whose humourous, benevolent, sentimental treatment of life in his panoramic novels sets him apart as a writer and as a man. A life is filled with unfullfilled desires and dissapointments yet Trollope, in many ways a man of his time with regards attitudes to women, the Irish Home rule, the superiority of the English, hunting, etc lived other lives through his books and characters without losing sight of the fact that writing was his means of making a living. A big man, with a boy's fragility that he never lost, a desire to be loved, the biographer Victoria Glendinning brings the man behind the books to life. And she does so with a lot of candour and sensitivity doing the great man justice. Now to more Trollope through his books.
July 1, 2021
Victoria Glendinning set out to write her biography of Trollope, thinking she was the only one in the field. Shortly after beginning, she found out that three other scholarly biographies were in the works, so her work came out in the midst of a plethora of interest in Trollope. Her book, however, emphasizes the family life and personal relationships of the great writer. She uses those little asides in his novels where A. T. talks to his readers of his observations about life and love as she describes the progress of his life and thought.
Trollope was a unique man, I've read about half of his works, but he seems to me to have had a great insight into human character and personal relationships. This biography gives some insight into the life that created that insight. Well worth reading. I managed its 513 pp in just three weeks.
Trollope was a unique man, I've read about half of his works, but he seems to me to have had a great insight into human character and personal relationships. This biography gives some insight into the life that created that insight. Well worth reading. I managed its 513 pp in just three weeks.
October 28, 2009
An excellent and entertaining biography. There are a few things I learned about Trollope that I'd rather not have known -- his passion for fox-hunting, for example, which is inexplicable and inexcusable. But in general the biography made me want to read more of his novels. And there are plenty of them to read! What demons of productivity those Victorians were.
December 13, 2023
I think a lot of people get into Victorian novels and old movies, among other things, out of a desire for—please do not feed the Twitter prompts about his—small-c conservative art. That idea is typically blown up by appealing to the art; Dickens was a progressive in his own time and only seems conservative now that novels don't conventionally end with a marriage.
The more damaging and universal issue for seekers after normie art is that artists are nearly always huge weirdos, and always have been. Wikipedia has been a disaster for watching old movies with your in-laws; it has never been easier to discover how many times the virtuous kid-sister-type in the screwball comedy was married before she was 19. (I'm not a good-enough novelist to be a psychopath so I don't tell my in-laws about this, I just look it up. There's no reason to spoil My Man Godfrey for anybody.) Dickens was probably fun to be near, but not fun to be around.
Anthony Trollope called himself a liberal-conservative or a conservative-liberal, I can't remember which, and wrote novels that even in their own time were seen as moderate. More incredibly, he did not cheat on his wife, did not quit his job at the PO until he was forced out, did not become a mesmerist... he was, for people who have been searching for the real deal, an honest-to-God center-of-the-compass man of his time who practiced what he preached, which was also not all that weird. (His books are much better than this sounds! Please read his books.) If you were Anthony Trollope's friend you'd probably find him a little irritating sometimes, but you could trust him.
This is all preamble to the big mystery of Trollope's biography, which is why nobody in his own life said anything about his wife Rose. He met Rose (an Englishwoman) in Ireland, on PO business, well before he became a novelist. She proofread all his books and traveled the world with him. They wrote sweet but not very edifying letters all the time. His friends, all inveterate letter-writers, met her hundreds of times. His mother—a novelist and a truly amazing character in her own right, who never had an opinion she couldn't share—spent a lot of time with them.
And basically nobody ever said anything about her. We know she had small feet—a compliment that allows us to trace her to the Victorian period, certainly—and prematurely white hair, and that she was a careful dresser, and that they were devoted to each other. But she just didn't make an impact.
In this biography (which is also great on Trollope, his mother, and his sons), Glendinning's great addition to Trollopiana is to paint his heroines over the invisible woman—since he wrote multiple novels a year, and since we know what they were doing at any given moment, she can trace his changing ideas about women and marriage and even her changing opinions, the differing views that emerge in Trollope's writing as generalizations about the way husbands and wives see the world. It works incredibly well.
I feel bad for people who want to find conservative artists, and also the women who had to live with the non-conservative ones, so I was of course grateful to see that Trollope emerges here as the eccentrically normal type you would expect from his narrators, and that his marriage appears to have been the everything-in-moderation reward he always granted to his heroes and heroines.
The more damaging and universal issue for seekers after normie art is that artists are nearly always huge weirdos, and always have been. Wikipedia has been a disaster for watching old movies with your in-laws; it has never been easier to discover how many times the virtuous kid-sister-type in the screwball comedy was married before she was 19. (I'm not a good-enough novelist to be a psychopath so I don't tell my in-laws about this, I just look it up. There's no reason to spoil My Man Godfrey for anybody.) Dickens was probably fun to be near, but not fun to be around.
Anthony Trollope called himself a liberal-conservative or a conservative-liberal, I can't remember which, and wrote novels that even in their own time were seen as moderate. More incredibly, he did not cheat on his wife, did not quit his job at the PO until he was forced out, did not become a mesmerist... he was, for people who have been searching for the real deal, an honest-to-God center-of-the-compass man of his time who practiced what he preached, which was also not all that weird. (His books are much better than this sounds! Please read his books.) If you were Anthony Trollope's friend you'd probably find him a little irritating sometimes, but you could trust him.
This is all preamble to the big mystery of Trollope's biography, which is why nobody in his own life said anything about his wife Rose. He met Rose (an Englishwoman) in Ireland, on PO business, well before he became a novelist. She proofread all his books and traveled the world with him. They wrote sweet but not very edifying letters all the time. His friends, all inveterate letter-writers, met her hundreds of times. His mother—a novelist and a truly amazing character in her own right, who never had an opinion she couldn't share—spent a lot of time with them.
And basically nobody ever said anything about her. We know she had small feet—a compliment that allows us to trace her to the Victorian period, certainly—and prematurely white hair, and that she was a careful dresser, and that they were devoted to each other. But she just didn't make an impact.
In this biography (which is also great on Trollope, his mother, and his sons), Glendinning's great addition to Trollopiana is to paint his heroines over the invisible woman—since he wrote multiple novels a year, and since we know what they were doing at any given moment, she can trace his changing ideas about women and marriage and even her changing opinions, the differing views that emerge in Trollope's writing as generalizations about the way husbands and wives see the world. It works incredibly well.
I feel bad for people who want to find conservative artists, and also the women who had to live with the non-conservative ones, so I was of course grateful to see that Trollope emerges here as the eccentrically normal type you would expect from his narrators, and that his marriage appears to have been the everything-in-moderation reward he always granted to his heroes and heroines.
June 20, 2023
One of the epigraphs Glendinning chooses is a quote from Trollope: “The man of letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography. What there is in his mind, is being declared to the world at large by himself.” Glendinning has taken this passage to heart and uses many examples from Trollope’s novels to elucidate his way of thinking. She says that in reading Trollope, she learned “how he thought about flirting, democracy, picnics, age and aging, digestion, Christmas, art and architecture, crinolines, hairstyles, dancing, wine, gardens, bad smells, illness and insanity, cigars, male friendships, spiritualism, swimming, women’s teeth and the way dinner should be served.” And - delightfully - she shares much of this with us. In fact, sometimes she shares too much, at least for me. So many examples from so many books become tiresome and distracting as we jump from novel to novel.
Glendinning cleverly takes central questions in Trollope’s books and lets them guide her writing of the biography. So his exploration in his novels of “the nature of marriage and the balance of power between the sexes” is reflected in Glendinning's examination of his marriage, his relationships with the feisty, independent-minded women he had crushes on, and his mother, who “can be seen as a feminist heroine, but she was not a comfortable mother for Anthony.”
Another theme Glendinning explores is the inner and outer man. As she writes, “The balancing of public and private, outer and inner, is a problem of all biography. It was a problem for Trollope in the management of his own life and one of his preoccupations as an author.” Glendinning does her best to reveal the inner man. She looks beneath Trollope’s “traditionally bluff, clubbish, roast-beef kind of masculinity,” so we learn about his frequently disputatious temperament and his keen awareness of life’s complexity, that there’s good in the bad and bad in the good. We meet a dreamy adolescent who told himself stories as he walked 12 miles a day to and from school. A man who liked women to be pretty and pleasant, home to be comfortable and social hierarchies to be maintained, but who typically was ill every Christmas. A boy beaten daily by the school prefect (who was also his elder brother) who grew into a man that loved the vigorous riding of the fox hunt and took courageous leaps in the dark that propelled him into a new and better life.
For Glendinning, taking on a biography of Trollope meant taking on the Victorian age, relationships between the sexes and among the classes, politics, money, contraception, the defining qualities of a gentleman and so much more. Because it’s Victoria Glendinning she did an excellent job of making unmanageable quantities of information as manageable as possible, but it was still a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless, this book is well worth reading, providing a wealth of insights and giving Trollope, so often typecast and overshadowed in his lifetime by his mother and brother, his due.
Glendinning cleverly takes central questions in Trollope’s books and lets them guide her writing of the biography. So his exploration in his novels of “the nature of marriage and the balance of power between the sexes” is reflected in Glendinning's examination of his marriage, his relationships with the feisty, independent-minded women he had crushes on, and his mother, who “can be seen as a feminist heroine, but she was not a comfortable mother for Anthony.”
Another theme Glendinning explores is the inner and outer man. As she writes, “The balancing of public and private, outer and inner, is a problem of all biography. It was a problem for Trollope in the management of his own life and one of his preoccupations as an author.” Glendinning does her best to reveal the inner man. She looks beneath Trollope’s “traditionally bluff, clubbish, roast-beef kind of masculinity,” so we learn about his frequently disputatious temperament and his keen awareness of life’s complexity, that there’s good in the bad and bad in the good. We meet a dreamy adolescent who told himself stories as he walked 12 miles a day to and from school. A man who liked women to be pretty and pleasant, home to be comfortable and social hierarchies to be maintained, but who typically was ill every Christmas. A boy beaten daily by the school prefect (who was also his elder brother) who grew into a man that loved the vigorous riding of the fox hunt and took courageous leaps in the dark that propelled him into a new and better life.
For Glendinning, taking on a biography of Trollope meant taking on the Victorian age, relationships between the sexes and among the classes, politics, money, contraception, the defining qualities of a gentleman and so much more. Because it’s Victoria Glendinning she did an excellent job of making unmanageable quantities of information as manageable as possible, but it was still a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless, this book is well worth reading, providing a wealth of insights and giving Trollope, so often typecast and overshadowed in his lifetime by his mother and brother, his due.
June 23, 2022
Anthony Trollope / Victoria Glendinning. I thought this book was a fine biography. There were sections devoted to his literary style and his social values that I found tedious occasionally, but I understand the desire to be comprehensive. His life story was thorough and fascinating, I thought. I was impressed with Glendinning’s very evident scholarship. Near the conclusion, she speaks of Trollope’s “genius.” Personally, I think she could have tipped her hand sooner.
January 1, 2024
Disgusting man (who said its 'impossible not to waste money on giving alms', and who thinks dying homeless people ought to work for his charity in famine struck Ireland, and who hated women unless they purposely dressed to please HIM) who has his heroes think about thier fiancee as they watch the barbaric and bloody death of foxes, and pathetic, rabid atheist authoress who can't shut up about her evil beliefs.
June 25, 2018
This is a wonderfully written and researched biography of an amazingly prolific writer who deserves more attention than he gets. Granted, reading it is enhanced by my having read more than a few of his novels, but the interesting life of this dynamic character, and the illumination of his times, might make it worthwhile for any reader.
March 13, 2020
A detailed and fascinating account of Trollope's life with some interesting insertions from his many novels. The only reason I haven't awarded five stars is because the last few chapters seem to fizzle out and became very slightly tedious. The rest of the book was excellent, so I highly recommend it.
September 17, 2022
If the stories and possibilities in this book weren't fiction, I guarantee that not everyone would believe that reality is an absolute right. Very interesting book. It's astonishing and impossible to resist.
November 30, 2023
Extremely well researched. Provides many insights into the life and work of this brilliant prolific novelist who continues to enthuse us more than 100 years since his death. Draws interesting parallels between AT's life and work and does not shy away from exploring complex character traits.
November 5, 2019
Very interesting. Trollope had a very tough childhood and young adulthood.
Also interesting to see how a lot of his real life experiences made it into his books.
Also interesting to see how a lot of his real life experiences made it into his books.
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May 20, 2022Fry
June 20, 2022
Compelling account of A.T.'s personal and professional lives, and how they intertwined.
April 2, 2008
Gives insight into the period and some other interesting characters as it tells the story of Anthony Trollope. It also functions as a spotty history of the British post. Many quotes from his fiction are used to elaborate on his views and moods. The one drawback is that Glendinning jumps around in time occasionally, which can be confusing.
January 25, 2011
Very well written, I love the way she uses excerpts from the novels to explore the characters she is writing about. Somehow Trollope seems much larger, louder and rougher than I imagined - how does someone who lived that life write so beautifully about women? although, obviously, Lily Dale is very annoying!
"He was honest and true. But in the virtual reality of his fiction, he was a free man.'
"He was honest and true. But in the virtual reality of his fiction, he was a free man.'
August 11, 2015
A wonderful biography of a less-well-known Victorian author. The field tends to be dominated by Dickens, and there have been some real tree-killers written about him. Trollope was unhappy in different ways, and it's actually more interesting.
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February 8, 2011AN Excellent biography
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews