Anthony Trollope

In this lively, affectionate, and compellingly readable biography, Victoria Glendinning, the greatly admired literary biographer (of Rebecca West, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, and Elizabeth Bowen), gives us for the first time a woman's intuitive view of Anthony Trollope. She brings to her story of this legendary writer a fresh emphasis on family, particularly on Trollope's relationship with his formidable mother, with his failure of a father, with his bullying older brother (Mother's favorite), and with his tubercular sisters. But it is Anthony as husband and lover that intrigues her most; she investigates with sensitivity the nature of his (unconsummated) love for the liberated young American Kate Field, and, most important, she discovers Rose, regarded in past biographies as a shadowy figure of a wife but viewed here as central to his life, 'bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh'. Throughout, Glendinning explores the disjunction between the outer man - the hearty, 'clubbish, roast-beef' type of Englishman that Anthony became - and the vulnerable inner self, haunted by an unhappy childhood (he was a scruffy charity student at Harrow, hazed by his own brother, separated from his adored mother for years while she was discovering America). We come to know him during his demeaning tenure in London as a junior post office clerk and a postal investigator in famine-stricken Ireland, where he acquired his passion for hunting and for dancing, and where he found his dearest love, Rose. Ireland turned his life around. And soon the novels appeared, slowly bringing him fame and fortune, distinguished friends, and new worlds as he traveled to America, the West Indies, Australia, and South Africa. What gives Victoria Glendinning's book its particular vitality, intimacy, and wit is that she lets Trollope speak for himself.