Anthony Trollope: Encyclopedia II - Anthony Trollope - Reputation

Anthony Trollope - Reputation

After his death, Trollope's Autobiography appeared. It was largely this volume that led to Trollope's downfall with the critics. Even during his writing career, reviewers of his books tended increasingly to shake their heads over his prodigious output (and the same went for Charles Dickens), but when Trollope revealed that he actually adhered to a definite schedule, he confirmed his critics' worst fears. The Muse, in their view, might just possibly be immensely prolific, but she would never work on schedule. (Interestingly, no-one has decried Gustave Flaubert for diligence, though he too worked on a schedule-scheme similar to Trollope's.) Worse, Trollope admitted that he wrote for money, and called the disdain of money false and foolish. The Muse should not be aware of money, claimed the critics.

Henry James drove the final nail into the coffin of Trollope's reputation. The young James wrote some scathing reviews of Trollope's novels (The Belton Estate, for instance, he called "a stupid book, without a single thought or idea in it ... a sort of mental pablum"). He also made it clear that he despised Trollope's narrative method; a real novel, in James's view, should maintain "the fiction of fiction", and never talk as if the made-up characters actually were made up. Nor would the reliable narrator have appealed to James's tastes. As trends in the world of the novel moved increasingly towards subjectivity, James's views and, more importantly, modern ideas on the novel in general, assured that Trollope would remain obscure for decades. In the 1940s attempts were made to resurrect Trollope; he enjoyed a critical Renaissance in the 1960s, and again in the 1990s. Critics today are particularly interested in Trollope's portrayal of women — which caused remark even in his own day for his remarkable insight and sensitivity to the inner conflicts caused by the constrained position of women in Victorian society. But the understanding that critics find largely in Trollope's portrayal of women, readers find in Trollope's portrayals of human beings in general.

A Trollope Society flourishes in the United Kingdom.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Reputation", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki