Trollope and Women

Antony Trollope was born in 1815, during the years of the Regency, but he developed as a novelist in the Victorian era.  He died in 1882.  Still his Regency youth did have an effect on him, making him a more tolerant worldly wise man than some Victorian men...
He was the son of Thomas Adolphus Trollope and Mrs Fanny Trollope who was a very successful travel writer and novelist.  His father had serious problems of depression and mental health and wasn’t able to make a living for his family, and his mother had to work instead.  Thomas had a bad temper and though highly educated and trained a as barrister, he was too irritable to make a living at the Bar.  He tried farming but was unsuccessful. Their marriage was far from happy and the children suffered.   Antony felt neglected because his mother was away pursuing her work much of the time, but she had little choice, since she had to support her family.  He was sent to Harrow as a day boy, because the family farm was in the area, and so he could go there for free. However, he was miserable there, he felt that he was worse off in some ways than poor children  as a middle class child who was did not have enough money to live in a genteel style.  He believed that he was sneered at by other boys, for looking dirty and uncared for...
After Harrow, he had to find a job, and he had not done very well at school.    He was lucky enough to get into the Civil Service. Because of this,   he was opposed to competitive exams for public service jobs. He believed that he would never have managed to get into the civil service, had it not been for influence - but once there he had done well and had a successful career.  He believed that competitive exams did not necessarily pick the best candidates...

He was at first unhappy in his job;  he was a struggling clerk based in London and living in lodging houses, with no money and little society.
He got into debt, was bad at his job and when a chance came up to go to work in Ireland, his supervisor was glad to get rid of him.  When he went there however, it was the happiest time of his life.  He loved the country.  In spite of its terrible poverty, there was a gaiety and charm about the place and its social groups that he had never experienced before. He loved to hunt and enjoyed the country sports there. He was popular in a way that he had never been in England.   He became more successful at work.
He met his wife, Rose Heseltine, who gave him love and understanding that compensated for the earlier miseries of his family life. He also began to rise in his career and he also began to write novels.

He continued to work in the Post Office for many years, while becoming a successful novelist. Some have felt that he forced himself to write, at times and could have done better if he hadn't been so pragmatic.. However he did need money and worked very hard to achieve success both in the Postal service and at his novels.
 His marriage seems to have been quietly happy though in later years, he had a platonic romance with an American woman, Kate Field, many years his junior, who was a writer and lecturer.

Many of his novels were about the Political process in the UK. His six famous Novels about the Pallisers are set around the life of a great Whig family who are part of the governing classes.  He was interested in politics, and many of his novels cover the issues and problems of standing for parliament, the political issues of the day, such as the Ballot, Women’s rights, and so on.  He specialised in writing about the social side of political life, where the upper classes met at their country houses.

Trollope was what he called an “advanced conservative liberal”… in that in many ways he clung to old fashioned traditions, but he realised that reform was necessary... and that he wanted to improve the lot of ordinary people.
With regard to the issue of women’s rights, he was similarly ambivalent.  He had old fashioned views, and loved a woman to be feminine; he believed that women should marry and have children, not go in for careers or women’s rights.  His mother’s  having to work hard, and “unsexing herself “, by so doing, may have had some influence on him, in relation to this issue.   But he also understood on some level why women did “go in for women’s rights.”  He was aware of how badly a woman might be treated by her husband... In his novel “He Knew he was Right”, he shows us a man, Louis Trevelyan, who begins to suspect his wife of infidelity and who ends up insane...  In the Palliser novels, one of his best written characters is Robert Kennedy  who marries Lady Laura Standish.  Laura, an earl’s daughter, loves being a political hostess, and hopes, as Kennedy’s wife, to have a salon where political issues are debated.  As a single woman she fell deeply in love with Phineas Finn, a young Irishman who has to make his way in the world and has no money.  Laura marries Kennedy because she has given up her dowry, to help her brother pay his debts and so she cannot afford to marry the impoverished Finn.
 Kennedy becomes jealous and suspicious, succumbs to religious mania and refuses to let his wife have much freedom; he is particularly reluctant to allow her to act as a political hostess.  She eventually leaves him and he dies, insane. Trollope knew the cruelty and humiliations that a man can inflict on his innocent wife and especially he knew of about mental health problems which can turn a man into a tyrannical husband.   So underneath his conservative views, there was sympathy with women’s problems and the things that happen in their lives.  His women characters are often the most memorable.  
Without breaking the rule of Victorian propriety, he is well able to write about sexual issues... and passions.  In his first Palliser novel, “Can you Forgive her”, the ostensible heroine is Alice Grey a rather tiresome young woman who changes her mind about her fiancé, a story which is of limited interest!   Alice is prim and proper, and Trollope gets very embroiled in the issue of whether she was right to break her engagement... But the real heroine is already married. She is the Lady Glencora Palliser…  Glencora has been pushed into a marriage of convenience, with a safe and dull young man whose passion is for politics, and currency reform. She has loved a wild and selfish young man, Burgo Fitzgerald, who loves her in his way, and would have married her gladly for her large fortune.  But her family have forced her to give up Burgo and marry Plantagenet Palliser.  
Glencora is unhappy with him, and they have no child, at first, so she begins to toy with the idea of becoming Fitzgerald’s mistress and running away with him believing that this will free him to find a wife who could have children and let her be free to find love.  Burgo has genuine feelings for her, and he is sexually attractive to her, which Plantagenet is not.  Trollope delicately hints that the marriage is not successful in the bedroom because of the lack of attraction and the fact that Plantagenet is so devoted to his work that he can spare little time or affection for his young wife.  We can see that, although Glencora learns to love Plantagenet, and they become closer, she will never have the passion for him that she had for her first love.  As the novels progress, she becomes rather more conventional, and enjoys the social “game” of scheming for titles and honours and the like.  She uses her large fortune to make Plantagenet’s prime ministership a social success, because she cares more about social "games" now than she did as a younger woman.  She adores her children, and focuses on them... She is also a kindly mentor to her younger friends in society, doing her best to help with matrimonial and social problems.  Still, while she has grown to love her husband...it is clear that a lot of this activity is to make up for the things that are missing in her own marriage.  In later years, she tries to arrange for her daughter Mary to marry the man she loves, Frank Tregear, rather than be pushed into a socially suitable marriage, as she had been. 

Trollope is aware of women’s need for sexual and romantic affection, and shows it very clearly in the picture of the Palliser marriage.  And he also notes that women need work.  Officially he disapproves of women working or having careers, but on another level he sympathises with Glencora’s and Laura’s desires to have a political career... He knows that both of them would be better politicians than their husbands.  Glencora is much more thick skinned and a better talker than her husband.  Trollope can see that they both need the role of political hostess, to occupy them, and that without that role they will become very unhappy.  And while he does dislike the notion of women “taking to the lecture platform” he can see that they do need something to do. 

Upper class women did have an acceptable role as supporters of their husbands, in whatever work the husband engaged in.  Glencora is happy when as the Prime Minister’s wife, she can organise parties and run her salon... And she also has the role of helping to run the Pallisers’ estates, which does not interest Plantagenet.

However she goes too far, and makes a stupid mistake in supporting Ferdinand Lopez, an “outsider” who wants to get on in politics, but who has no money.  
Lopez is dishonest and sleazy and Glencora’s foolish involvement with him angers Plantagenet.   Trollope dislikes tyrannical husbands like Kennedy or Louis Trevelyan but he veers between sympathising with rebellious wives like Glencora and at times criticise them for their “unfeminine” behaviour.

End of Part I