“…In San Francisco Mrs. Hurtle was regarded as a mystery. Some people did not quite believe that there ever had been a Mr. Hurtle. Others said that there certainly had been a Mr. Hurtle, and that to the best of their belief he still existed. The fact, however, best known of her was, that she had shot a man through the head somewhere in Oregon. She had not been tried for it, as the world of Oregon had considered that the circumstances justified the deed. Everybody knew that she was very clever and very beautiful — but everybody also thought that she was very dangerous.” — Excerpt from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
From the Library of Congress photo archives -- undated
In school I was plagued by Victorian heroines — quasi-tubercular virgins who were buffeted by one outrage followed by another — this was what it meant to go to English class and do the assigned reading. Only men were heroic and swash-buckling. I signed up voluntarily for all of Jane Austen’s heroines, who, while plucky, were virtuous, extremely bound by convention, and ironically from a woman author who never married, abandoned the reader at the marriage altar, as if marriage meant an end to all unsettled business in a woman’s life. I regarded these novels, as much as I loved Ms. Austen, as offering little insight to a modern woman seeking a sequel to her own part one. I read a lot of other stuff instead — ALL of French literature, the ancients of Greece and Mesopotamia, modern Americans, the Elizabethans and the Restoration Theater, but nineteenth century England, with a few exceptions — Oscar Wilde’s outrageous humor and the delicious silliness of Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas — bored me to no end.
Then I recently discovered the Trollope family with all its buttoned-up but still baroque dysfunctions.
I knew how the word “trollope” came to mean a woman of ill repute — a Mrs. Fanny Trollope had visited the United States in 1830 and had returned to Europe to write a book about us, Domestic Manners of the Americans, here in which she complained about absolutely everything we did and said to no end. She actually went so far as to say that the foundational idea of our society (however imperfectly expressed it was in 1830) — “all men are created equal” was a total crock and that it was high time that we uncouth hillbillies learned who our betters really were — the British, of course. I had read in a history book in tenth grade a short excerpt from this book, which has been out of print since a decade or two before the Civil War, and thought it was bitingly funny — she described with all the fluster of an English snoot the disgust she felt about men spitting tobacco and women asking her impolite questions without proper introduction. It was delicious the way that a bitchy character on 90210 is delicious, and I always wanted to read what she said. However, at the time, that would have required about the same amount of inter-library loan international diplomacy as getting my hands on an original Guttenberg Bible to check the font size. Yet, I never forgot, especially, since when I was called names by angry men, they often chose the T-word to insult me — very unusually for someone of my generation. “Trollope” evokes a kind of whale-bone-corseted sluttiness, an old-world tea-party-low-cut sluttiness with sharp-Alice-Roosevelt- Longworth “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody come sit next to me,”-worthy wit, not just average twentieth century sluttiness. I always saw this as a mark of distinction, as I have learned to treasure the insults of my enemies almost in the same manner in which I treasure the compliments of my friends. Both indicate the amount of success I have had in accomplishing my purposes in this life.
Now, thanks to the paperless world of electronic libraries, I was able to acquire a copy of that above-mentioned bitchy masterpiece in the public domain, and let me tell you, it was worth the price of my Amazon Kindle to read it — I howled out loud with laughter. I say, no wonder we hated her. I also understand why she thought we were such a pack of future Jerry Springer guests with no sense at all. She made a better living as a writer than most men of her day because she possessed a high-minded version of Simon Cowell’s articulate rudeness. We tune in to him, and she was a best-seller.
Only because she was the mother of Anthoy Trollope, the very British novelist of Victorian B-List or C-List fame, I decided to venture into his novels and his biography to find out what I could.
Ladies and trollopes, what a surprise!
He is in fact up to the very things I did not ever care for in Victorian Lit — he uplifts the institutions of the Anglican Church and Victorian marriage, the family unit as it was popularly understood in his day, and he is as classist as Kipling and, at times, as maudlin as Dickens. However — and this is a big however — he messes with all the institutions he lionizes, and he uses American characters to do it, and many of the women are total trollopes. In a Trollope novel, everybody is trying to find a mate or a fortune, but romance and capitalism are the same thing, even where people are sincere. Even in his Barchester novels, the church is where the money changers go to perform their alchemy. It’s not that he doesn’t have his Christ-like parsons and his virtuous virgins – he does. However, there are these other people in his works who are so disestablishmentarian as to make the others look like loveable boobs who have missed the zeitgeist of their times. My thinking as to why I was forced kicking and screaming in high school to read so much Dickens and none of Trollope is that he tells it so much like it is, particularly about young people and sex, that somebody at the PTA must have banned the good stuff.
For those of you who have never read Trollope, imagine the drawing rooms of The Importance of Being Ernest at tea but infiltrated by Annie Oakley. That’s like the presence of Mrs. Hurtle in The Way We Live Now, an American woman who admits to a number of people who will talk, and she knows it, that she has had sex without being married to one of the heroes of the book, tries to and nearly succeeds at chasing away the fiancee of this hero, and she does so while threatening to shoot him like she did another man in Oregon who wronged her. She actually says in a book written in the 1870s something that would not really be imagined until the feminism of the 1970s that she does not need a man to defend her honor — she brought her six-shooter to England with her and she still shoots straight in a duel. And she says this while looking like a Gibson Girl in a bustle and a bun.
I love her. I love her shoes. And I love her some more.
I also love Arabella Trefoil in The American Senator, an aristocrat without an inheritance who is supposed to marry money, like almost any Jane Austen character. The difference between Arabella and any of Jane Austen’s heroines is that Arabella is all about the cash. She has no other thoughts of even friendship with men until late in the book, and she resents her situation — she asks, very reasonably, why she should not be angry at the fact that women have no other way in her society of getting money. She talks romance but thinks like a Wall Street MBA closer. At the end of the book, she finds herself married to an ambassador, who warns her that it won’t be all parties and frivolity any more — she will have work to do as an ambassador’s wife. She tells him, “I have found the pleasures very hard.” It looked like a royal ball, but it was a day at the office for her — and she admits it.
The two women I mention are not revolutionaries — they muddle their way through circumstances over which they have impaired control — impaired because they are women in the Victorian Age. Still, they are refreshing to see. So are the openly dysfunctional portraits Trollope gives of Victorian families without “Poor Oliver Twist” hand-wringing, just the picture as he imagined it — unsentimental, even anti-sentimental.
Anthony Trollope wasn’t a feminist. 
He opposed women’s suffrage. He seems to have had a difficult relationship with his trollope mother. He married a very proper, very dutiful, and very dull English woman. He loved her dutifully, commenting that it was good for a man to have his dinner on time the way he liked it. He seems to have had no back talk from her. However, in his forties, Anthony Trollope meets and falls in love with a feminist suffrage militant woman from New York. She was wild. She was free. She was smart and frank. Nothing much scared her, not their age difference, not his marital status, and not even his copious, scary white beard. I admit I would not commit adultery with any man, but even a single Anthony Trollope would meet one of my Lady Bic Razors before his lips met mine. However, trollope epithet notwithstanding, I am a New York feminist of another era. Perhaps she really dug the whole Santa Claus vibe. What’s clear is that he decided, probably thanks to her (and freudianly, his mother), that women who thought for themselves and who weren’t afraid to fight to be free were just much hotter than those good girls that everybody was supposed to like back then but didn’t actually like any less or any more than they like them now.
I love it that Trollope, after his mother hung us all out to dry, used American truth-tellers as a device in multiple works to convey his true thoughts. I admit I am disappointed, much the way I am disappointed that Jefferson had slaves, that Trollope loved opinionated women, he just didn’t want to emancipate them, not even in his books.
Brilliantly, Trollope does not punish the trollopes in his books — they make out okay, and we don’t hate them when we close the cover shut.
I have forgiven the dead white men I was forced to read in English class a bit because I now know that they were in better and more iconoclastic company than I heretofore knew. I am grateful for the bitchy voice of a foremother and her undue influence on her underappreciated son. I am still looking for a novelist who writes about second acts for women, sequels post-alter, post-divorce, post- sagging, post- wrinkles. I intend to write whatever I need that I do not find pret-a-porter. Doubtless Mrs. Fanny Trollope would hate my homespun and call it uncouth, but that’s okay — she has given me her name, and I value her criticism as well as any other’s.
