Trollope Underground

In their provocative examination of Anthony Trollope’s novels, Margaret Markwick and Deborah Denenholz Morse, two leading Trollope scholars, explore Trollope’s more famous novels, along with his less familiar texts. Intentionally provocative and unconventional in their approach to a writer who is frequently at the center of Victorian Studies, the authors offer fresh perspectives on Trollopean ideas about gender, family, class, and nation. Among the topics are restriction practices in Trollope and their implications relative to new developments in contraceptive techniques, disgraced relatives in Trollope’s fiction, mother-daughter struggles for power and love, ignored wives, unappreciated sisters, Trollope as biographer, debates in the mid-Victorian Church, teaching Trollope, and discarded women and forgotten texts. Secret Trollope is distinguished by an intertextuality within Markwick and Morse’s text that mirrors that within Trollope’s novels, a strategy that allows for myriad connections throughout this stimulating book.