Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Milton Trollope

Over the next three years, she made several other visits to France and was inspired to take an American excursion with Wright. In 1824 she visited La Grange, Lafayette's estate in France. Soon after the move to the leased farm, her marital and financial strains led Frances to seek companionship and aid from Fanny Wright, ward of the French hero Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. Her fourth son Anthony Trollope became a well-known and received novelist, establishing a strong reputation, especially for his serial novels, such as those set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, and his political series the Palliser novels.ĭespite producing six living children, the Trollopes' marriage was reputedly unhappy. Her eldest surviving son, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, wrote mostly histories: The Girlhood of Catherine de Medici, History of Florence, What I Remember, Life of Pius IX, and some novels. This was where Frances gave birth to her last two children. When the Trollopes moved to a leased farm at Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1817, they faced financial struggles for lack of agricultural expertise. They had four sons and three daughters: Thomas Adolphus, Henry, Arthur, Emily (who died in a day), Anthony, Cecilia and Emily. At the age of 30, she married him on in Heckfield, Hampshire. In London, she met Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister.

She and her sister later moved to Bloomsbury, London, in 1803 to live with their brother, Henry Milton, who was employed in the War Office. As a child, Frances read a great amount of English, French and Italian literature. She was baptised at St Michael's, Bristol, on 17 March 1779. Her father was remarried to Sarah Partington of Clifton in 1800. Frances was five years old when her mother died in childbirth. Two of her sons, Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, became writers, as did her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope (née Ternan), second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope.īorn at Stapleton, Bristol, Frances was the third daughter and middle child of the Reverend William Milton and Mary Milton (née Gresley). In 1839, The New Monthly Magazine claimed, 'No other author of the present day has been at once so read, so much admired, and so much abused'. Some recent scholars note that modernist critics have omitted women writers such as Frances Trollope. She also wrote social novels: one against slavery is said to have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she also wrote the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels, which used a Protestant position to examine self-making.

Her book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), observations from a trip to the United States, is the best known. Frances Milton Trollope, also known as Fanny Trollope (10 March 1779 – 6 October 1863), was an English novelist who wrote as Mrs.

Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Milton Trollope