cover image Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope

Victoria Glendinning. Alfred A. Knopf, $30 (551pp) ISBN 978-0-394-58268-9

More fully than other recent biographers, Glendinning penetrates Anthony Trollope's (1815-1882) ``bluff, clubbish, roast-beef kind of Englishness,'' baring the vulnerable heart of the popular novelist. Raised by a strong-minded, resourceful mother and a hopelessly muddled father who badly mismanaged his businesses, Trollope ``despised female submissiveness,'' claims Glendinning. Although he lampooned feminist activists, the outspoken, independent women he met in middle life upset his notion of male supremacy and found their way into his fiction. Glendinning, biographer of Vita Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell, maintains that Trollope's wife Rose Heseltine was no doormat but a vital emotional mainstay. In Trollopian fashion the author weaves into her narrative what Trollope thought about architecture, corporal punishment, dancing, France, gardens, Irish rebellion, South Africa (he was an anti-imperialist), tea and much else. Through her astute criticism, we see how Trollope's fictional preoccupations--sexual betrayal, cross-class marriage, ambiguous relations between brothers and sisters--stemmed from his personal life and day-to-day concerns. A feast for fans, this perceptive biography will attract new readers to Trollope's works. Photos. BOMC alternate. (Feb.)