Frances Trollope

Frances Milton Trollope, also known as Fanny Trollope, was an English novelist and writer who published as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) is the best known. She also wrote social novels: one against slavery said to have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine self-making. Some recent scholars note how modernist critics exclude women writers such as Frances Trollope from consideration. 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". Two of her sons, Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, became writers. Her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope (née Ternan), second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope, was also a novelist. 

  
Born at Stapleton, Bristol, Frances was the third daughter and middle child of the Reverend William Milton and Mary Milton (née Gresley). Frances's mother died in childbirth when Frances was five years old. Her father was remarried to Sarah Partington of Clifton in 1800. She was baptised at St Michael's, Bristol, on 17 March 1779. As a child, Frances read a great amount of English, French and Italian literature. 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. 

  
In London, she met Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister, and at the age of 30, married him on 23 May 1809 in Heckfield, Hampshire. They had four sons and three daughters: Thomas Adolphus, Henry, Arthur, Emily (who died in a day), Anthony, Cecilia and Emily. When the Trollopes moved to a leased farm at Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1817, they faced financial struggles for lack of agricultural expertise. This was where Frances gave birth to her last two children. 

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. In 1824 she visited La Grange, Lafayette's estate in France. Over the next three years, she made several other visits to France and was inspired to take an American excursion with Wright. Frances thought of America as a simple economic venture and figured that she could save money by sending her children through Wright's communal school, as Wright had planned to reform the education of African American children and the formerly enslaved on their property in Tennessee. In 1827, Frances Trollope took most of her family to Fanny Wright's utopian community, Nashoba Commune, in the United States. Her husband and remaining family followed shortly after. 

Arriving in the United States four years earlier than her husband, she was able to develop an intimate relationship with Auguste Hervieu, a collaborator in her venture, and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio with her sons after the community failed. She also encouraged the sculptor Hiram Powers to do Dante Alighieri's Commedia in waxworks. 

From her return at the age of 50 until her death, her need of an income for her family and escape her debts led her to begin writing novels, memoirs of her travels, and other shorter pieces, while travelling around Europe. She became well acquainted with elites and figures of Victorian literature including Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Joseph Henry Green and R. W. Thackeray (a relative of William Makepeace Thackeray). She wrote 40 books: six travelogues, 35 novels, countless controversial articles, and poems. In 1843, Frances visited Italy and eventually moved to Florence permanently.