Anthony Trollope as painted by Samuel Lawrence, 1864 — although I have access to the image only in black-and-white, it seems to me to come closest to showing the expression on his face of the sensitive compassionate mind behind the novels. It’s my favorite.
Dear friends and readers,
Last weekend the London Trollope Society met at Somerville College, Oxford, as one of the first all women’s colleges to open her doors, an appropriate place to discuss Trollope’s valuing and esteem of women. It has had since then many women as students and faculty, who became famous, and powerful after residing here. For a separate more humanizing account (what we wore, games we played, dinners), see Adventures in Oxford and London: Meeting Friends. We spent the weekend immersing ourselves in talk about Trollope who emerged as a man much engaged by women. One of those who spoke, Deborah Denenholz Morse (Inaugural Sara E. Nance Professor of English, 2017-22, Plumeri Faculty Excellence Scholar, 2022-24), at William and Mary College, said at the conclusion of her talk (via zoom, the only one) that she was determined we should see how much Trollope valued his woman characters, respected and loved them. How he showed their inner passionate natures when confronted with a lover or husband (“Lily, Glencora, Ayala, and Isabel: Female Desire and Women’s Rights in Trollope’s Novels”). Of course (just talking of this particular presentation) that’s not the same as being for their emancipation from hundreds of years of real and metaphoric subjection, not the same as wanting women to have equal rights in politics, in the professions, as one of the authorities of the family.
And therein lies the paradox a bundle of contradictions at the center or sides of Trollope’s thinking about women. As Dinah Birch, CBE and Professor of English at Liverpool College, put it in the first talk of the first day (she introduced and framed the themes of the conference), “Trollope’s thinking about women shifted over the course of his career as he encountered views that challenged conventional models of gendered identity, and grew more sympathetic to women’s struggles with constraints that limited their options. And yet he never abandoned the traditional idea that a woman’s happiest destiny was that of wife and mother.” The title of her talk comes from a concluding chapter in Framley Personage, but may be found in variations elsewhere: “What should a woman do with her life?” I find in my notes that Prof Birch said The Bertrams was more of a tragedy than comedy and of great interest because of Caroline Waddington’s determination to be someone through her husband. She talked of other individually-minded strong women in Trollope’s novels too.
Miranda Otto as Mrs Winifred Hurtle (TWWLN, 2001, scripted Andrew Davies)
Papers about Trollope’s wavering back to conventionality, whether tongue-in-cheek or not, while he drew ever closer to “respecting, encouraging, sympathizing with women’s aspirations for a much freer public and personal life” lent themselves to theses kinds of alignments. Elizabeth Cantrell’s “Let Women Rebel: Anthony Trollope and ‘The Woman Question,'” was brilliant in bringing before us details in so many areas of life where we find his books and real life experiences middle class women directing their own lives in real life and in his fiction. Both women and men wanted a freer public life. She reminded us how many minor feminist women writers Trollope was enthusiastic about or worked with. She talked of parallels between the enslaved and married women’s position. Women similarly lacked autonomy and we watch them in the era slowly gain genuine rights, power and socialize (some) men (to support women and children) too to behave better to them.
I admit while the comparison of women with chattel slaves seems incommensurate, women’s lack of property, bodily and mobility rights before the law seems to edge her towards chattel slavery. On the one hand, the distance is immense: the enslaved person has no say over the next moment of his or her life, over his or her body, no respect as a human being. And yet “captivity” seems a familiar mode in this earlier period: so many people were indentured servants for example. We need to see women in this context of a lack of liberty for so many people at the time.
But other papers took considerably different directions. Alluding to Rebecca Traister’s marvelous book about unmarried women’s successful lives in the 20th century, All the Single Ladies: The Rise of an Independent Nation, Professors Linda McCain (Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University) and Alison Tait (Professor of Law and Associate Dean of faculty in the University of Richmond, Virginia) spoke from a long paper they had published in Washington Journal of Law and Policy, “Household Intimacy and being Unmarried: Family Pluralism in the Novels of Anthony Trollope,” where they describe and detail in a number of Trollope’s novels his depiction of non-marital couples and families, made up sometimes of unmarried women and men who find real satisfaction and happiness in life without marriage or children. Notable examples include Miss Baker in The Bertrams, Miss Todd and Miss Troughton in Miss Mackenzie, Mrs Prime, a widow ruling the all women household in Rachel Ray, Lily Dale preferring to set up life with her mother, and the DeGuests in Small House at Allington and Miss Thoroughbung and Dolly Gray with her father preferring life with her father to a husband (Mr Scarborough’s Family). This is not to deny the heterosexual marriage is still one of the central concerns of Trollope’s fiction, but it exists amid a variety of other satisfied life patterns. As they covered all these unmarried and variously active female characters, Trollope’s fiction took on a new dimension.
Millais’ depiction of Mary Lady Mason’s adieu to Penelope Orme
In my paper, “Trollope’s Intriguing Women and Their Friendships,’ I also pointed to repeating patterns in Trollope’s fictions which are often not paid sufficient attention to, but when studied, yield a different way of thinking about his books and his women. I suggested that we look at them from another angle than we usually do: against the turning points in the novels which dramatize women’s relationships, from women’s various kinds of friendships to as mothers-and-daughters, and as sisters. From studying Clara Amedroz and Mrs Mary Askerton’s friendship in The Belton Estate, we begin to see how important and central a friendship may be in a woman’s life; we are also led to feel for transgressive women who are ostracized and left isolated and alone in their societies, except for the (rare but there) loyal woman friend. I looked at the turning points in the plot-structure of The Way We Live Now in the women’s decision-making with one another, and the pain of conscious justified betrayal when frenemies exclude one on grounds of self-protection (in fact just the opposition state ensues, i.e., vulnerability and eventually possibly destitution). Looked at from the angle of what one might called an embedded woman’s novel, the unabridged The Duke’s Children has a third not-so-ghostly couple, Lady Mabel Grex and her ex-lover to whom she had been engaged, and Frank Tregear, whose past together haunts the book the way Lady Glencora as absent mother haunts and shapes it. The Duke’s Children unabridged looked at this way becomes a richer and different book.
Janet Maw as Eleanor Bold wooed by Peter Blythe as Bertie Stanhope (Barchester Chronicles, 1983, scripted Alan Plater)
Some of the papers or talks did not follow any narrow trajectories. Mark Green (editor of Trollopiana who has an interest in Golden Age Detective fiction) talked about “Women and Money,” about the constraints women were subjected to when they attempted to earn or to control their own or inherited money. What could be a more central topic affecting women in Trollope and the 19th century. “The legal position of women during many of Trollope’s novels is couverture,” he said. He told us the provisions of the Married Woman’s Property Acts; for example, what was settlement. Under the pressure of these new laws, and women seeking to make them active (through lawyers — the upper middle class) economic circles eventually changed drastically. Martha Dunstable is our early (fabulously) wealthy heiress — from a version of “snake oil.” He also called attention to Eleanor Bold as wealthy widow. Prof Nicholas Shrimpton (Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall) was interested in Trollope’s portrayal of “what constitutes good or bad female behavior” from a conventional POV (what was modesty and immodesty). Virginia Grinevitch, closely studied Griselda Grantley whose name makes it emphatic that she is to be judged (ironically) against a screen of assumptions and symbolic thinking at first taken from Chaucer’s Clerk’s tale, and then in contrast to other of Trollope’s characters (like Lucy Robarts, or Mr Harding) in seven of Trollope’s novels (where she appears). Ginny suggested we can use Griselda Grantley as a measuring stick with Trollope more or less hostile to her as mercenary, heartless, and at the same time ironically successful in what she sets out to do and to be.
Professor Helen Small’s (editor of Journal of Victorian Culture) gave us a full exegesis, of the candid unconventional sexual content of Trollope’s two salacious (Trollope had difficulty finding any publisher) sexually unconventional short stories, “Mrs General Talboys,” who living in the Anglo demi-monde of Italy plays at committing adultery, and “A Ride Across Palestine,” an obvious homosexual-homo-erotic encounter (or Hero and Leander as in Christopher Marlowe) at length between two seeming men (one turns out to be a woman). We can connect them to the “Platforms” or journals they appeared in — we are in “queer Trollope” ground, according to Kate Flint’s nomenclature. Trollope was making a provocative use of the printing press. A third which appeared in the London Journal, “The Parsons Daughter of Oxney Colne,” does not on the surface seem as as much about sexual ambiguity, but rather sexual availability, but there is a real if quiet life ravaged here. Full scale human loss
Anna Carter as Lady Mabel Grex (1975 Pallisers, concluding episodes)
On the final day, when all the papers had been read aloud, and it was time for one more lunch and then adieus, those who had given papers came up in front of the room and sat in a row of chairs to answer a group of questions. Some were fun: which Trollope character would you like to spend a lot of time with? Others yet more about male-female human relationships and money and the experience of life in Trollope’s novels from the woman’s POV.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 