Trollope characters
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Trollope: A Biography
Anthony Trollope was a giant of Victorian letters whose works are still read avidly today. Now, in what is surely the definitive biography, the world's leading expert on Trollope provides an amusing, insightful, and authoritative portrait of this remarkable figure.
N. John Hall writes with an unparalleled knowledge of his subject--he is already the general editor of the 62-volume Selected Works of Anthony Trollope, and the editor of Letters of Anthony Trollope, which Victoria Glendinning (herself a Trollopian) suggested in The Spectator "already constitutes a biography by other means" simply by virtue of its "brilliant footnotes." In this volume, Hall draws on Trollope's works themselves, as well as all pertinent historical evidence, and interweaves Trollope's public and social life--as a civil servant, devoted hunter, and extensive traveler--with lucid accounts of his writing.
Starting with Trollope's early days on the family farm and at the famous Harrow School (studying with Byron's former tutor), we learn of Trollope's marriage, his politics (Hal
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New to The New Criterion?
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring, real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. “Imaginative literature,” therefore, is either boring or immoral or a mixture of both.
—Simone Weil
Such strictures have dogged Trollope from the beginning. Trollope has no “ideas”; he is too “comfortable”; his novels, with their abundance of clerics and happy endings, are insufficiently dramatic, passionate, challenging. Thomas Carlyle, than whom a less Trollopian figure can scarcely be imagined, sneered that the novelist was “irredeemably embedded in the commonplace, and grown fat upon it.” And Henry James—in his own, very different, way as un-Trollopian as Carlyle—dismissed The Belton Estate (1866) as “a work written for children; a work prepared for minds unable to think; . . . a stupid book.” “Life is vulgar,” James wrote in another early essay on Trollope, “but we know not how vulgar it is till we see it set down in his pages.” In the handful of pieces that he wrote about Troll
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Anthony Trollope
English novelist of the Victorian period (1815–1882)
Anthony Trollope (TROL-əp; 24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882)[2] was an English novelist and civil servant of the Victorian era. Among his best-known works is a series of novels collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which revolves around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote novels on political, social, and gender issues and other topical matters.[3]
Trollope's literary reputation dipped during the last years of his life,[4] but he regained somewhat of a following by the mid-20th century.
Biography
Anthony Trollope was the son of barrister Thomas Anthony Trollope and the novelist and travel writerFrances Milton Trollope. Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, Thomas Trollope failed at the Bar due to his bad temper. Ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and his expectations of inheritance were dashed when an elderly, childless uncle[a] remarried and fathered children. Thomas Trollope wa
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