Frances Trollope

Frances Milton Trollope (10 March 1779 – 6 October 1863) was an English novelist and writer who published as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) has been the best known, but she also published strong social novels: an anti-slavery novel said to influence the work of the American Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine self-making.

Recent scholars note that modernist critics tended to exclude women writers such as Frances Trollope from serious consideration. Her detractors familiarly called her by the diminutive Fanny Trollope, considered slightly vulgar, and discounted her prolific production; but her onetime notoriety can nevertheless perhaps be judged from the way The New Monthly Magazine in 1839 claimed that "No other author of the present day has been at once so read, so much admired, and so much abused".

Her first and third sons, Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, also became writers; Anthony Trollope became respected for his social novels.

Frances Trollope should not be confused with her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope (née Ternan), the second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope, and also a novelist.

Born at Stapleton, Bristol, Frances Milton at the age of 30 married Thomas A. Trollope, a barrister, on 23 May 1809 at Heckfield, Hampshire. They had four sons and three daughters, and he struggled with financial misfortune.

In 1827, Frances Trollope took her family to Fanny Wright's utopian community, Nashoba Commune, in the United States. This community soon failed, and she ended up in Cincinnati, Ohio with her sons. Although she tried to find ways to support herself, they were unsuccessful. She encouraged the sculptor Hiram Powers to do Dante Alighieri's Commedia in waxworks. After her return to England, she began writing to support her family.

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