A woman of some importance

Raymond Carr

FANNY TROLLOPE by Pamela Neville-Sington Viking, £20, pp. 432 From prime ministers down, we are all Trollopians now. This is a modem fashion. A Trollope addict in the Oxford of the late Thirties, I felt a provincial outcast among cosmopolitan aesthetes who read Alain Fournier, Malraux, Gide and Thomas Mann. With the Trollope boom we have collapsed into a comfortable provincialism, adding him to the nationalist pantheon of Dickens, Jane Austen and George Eliot, whose works are the standby for producers of TV costume dramas. Within a decade we have been given three scholarly biogra- phies of Anthony Trollope and now two biographies of his mother, Fanny. Yet had she not been the mother of a great and well loved novelist, she would have become a deservedly forgotten, once popular novel- ist, who, as The Spectator noted, aimed to hit the lowbrow taste of the circulating library, an aim she achieved 'remarkably well'.

What justifies her resurrection from obscurity and makes Dr Neville-Sington's biography a work of consummate scholar- ship, as well as a good read, if a trifle on the long side, is her subject's remarkable character which, for once, justifies the word `indomitable'.

Incurably gregarious, a tireless traveller, she made friends wherever she went. They ranged from Italian patriots to their oppressor, Prince Metternich; from obscure London literati to General Lafayette, the hero of two worlds. She could not, she confessed, bear to be alone. She got together a salon of sorts wherever she landed up: Bruges, Paris, Vienna, Florence. Only Cumbria and Cincinnati defeated her.

For most of her book, Dr Neville- Sington can rely on family letters and those many passages in Fanny's novels that reveal her personality. In the early chapters, where these are absent, she employs the `she must have known', 'she would have seen' gambits, the last resort of the source- less biographer.

What comes out of all this conjectural reconstruction is the portrait of a lively provincial blue-stocking given to amateur theatricals and picnics. You do not often nowadays run across girls at dances who can quote from Dante, read Latin and arc fluent in French and Italian. Not that these accomplishments helped her much in the London society she longed to enter. 'It was better to be thought an idiot than a BLUE.'

This may account for the disastrous marriage of this party-loving woman to Thomas Anthony Trollope, who could satisfy her intellectual demands but who, in his letter of proposal, wrote that `compliments were always my detestation'. Fanny wrote in despair:

One cannot help being pleased (at least women, I believe cannot) with expressions as well as proofs of tenderness from those whom they love.

A tragic sense of failure of the scholar denied recognition brought this reserved husband to eccentricity bordering on mad- ness. To make matters worse, his inept financial dealings — who but he would have built himself a country house on rent- ed land? — brought his family to destitu- tion. Obstinate but half aware of his failings, he became intolerable to all around him. 'No person', Anthony's brother Tom wrote, 'came into my father's presence who did not forthwith desire to escape from it.'

Fanny's escape can only have been the despairing act of a woman at the end of her tether, trapped in a hopeless marriage. She embarked with three young children and a maid to join a Utopian settlement in the backwoods of Tennessee. Utopia turned out to be four roofless cabins in a desolate wilderness. Unbroken by disaster, she scraped together the money to establish what came to be known as Trollope Folly in Cincinnati, as a cultural centre cum department store. After four years in America, she was penniless. Yet it was her use of this disagreeable adventure that made her a literary lion. Her Domestic Manners of the Americans was an immedi- ate best-seller.

She had hit the political jackpot. Pub- lished in 1832, the year of the Liberals' Great Reform Bill, Tories needed a propa- ganda boost. Liberals regarded America as a model of a democratic society. Fanny exposed it as a sham. It was not only that democracy had produced a coarse society of 'remorselessly spitting males', it was flawed at its roots, a monstrous hypocrisy. `You see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty and with the other flogging their slaves.' To the liberal Edinburgh Review, her book was 'an express advertise- ment against the Reform Bill'. Her pur- pose, she wrote, was `Poor Cinderella had just boards for a floor.'

to show how greatly the advantage is on the side of those who are governed by the few, instead of the many. The chief object she [the author] has had in view is to encourage her countrymen to hold fast by a constitution that ensures all the blessings which flow from established habits and solid principles.

This was the language of Burke. She had passed as a liberal. But no liberal, she wrote, could survive a stay in the false egal- itarianism of the United States.

Already a woman of 53, with the success of Domestic Manners she saw in a career as a professional writer the chance to keep her family financially afloat. By the time she died at 84 in 1863, she had written 35 novels. It was a heroic achievement, won against a background of dying offspring.

W. H. Auden insisted that knowledge of an author's life added nothing to the reader's appreciation of his work. This is a poet's counsel of perfection. The common reader will always find the relationship between the life of a writer and his works a subject of absorbing interest. The novels of Fanny and her son, like those of Tolstoy and Proust, were not, as it were, free-standing. Fanny was sometimes shunned lest acquaintance might lead to appearance in her works. 'Of course', she wrote, 'I draw from life, but I always pulp my acquaintances before serving them up. You never recognise a pig in a sausage.'

Dr Neville-Sington is particularly con- cerned with the influence of Fanny on her son. Certainly from her he learned the dis- cipline of hard labour. Both rose to write at 4 am. Both wrote for money. Who does not? Their common experience surfaces in their novels. But I think that Dr Neville- Sington underestimates Anthony's creative genius as he mulled over his 'castles in the air' on his walks and then set them down on paper at dawn. He did himself a grave injustice, as Henry James came to recognise, in likening his craft to shoe- making. The Trollopes may appear like literary battery hens — brother Tom could knock off a novel in a couple of weeks but Anthony saw himself as the peer of Dickens and his friend Thackeray. Fanny's only novel that bears reading today is The Widow Burnaby, the lively portrait of a monument of vulgarity in search of a husband.

Did Anthony, in his Autobiography, as Dr Neville-Sington suggests, bury his mother's literary reputation? I think not. A Regency girl, her racy novels jarred with mid- Victorian sensibilities, as did those of R. S. Surtees. Nevertheless, Anthony's portrait of her verges on hostility. He started writ- ing in the shade of her literary success; his brother Tom was her favourite son with whom she lived all her life 'in complete harmony', acting as her literary agent, set- tling her in Florence, already the capital of British expatriates in Tuscany. Anthony could not forgive her for deserting a sensi- tive 12-year-old and her pathetic husband by escaping to America. A wife [he wrote in Rachel Ray] does not cease to love her husband because he gets into trouble, She does not turn against him because others have quarrelled with him. She does not separate her lot because he is in debt.

This is too near the bone for comfortable reading. Trollope's conventional views of the duties of a wife as the 'angel in the house' stand in stark contrast to his moth- er's militant feminism. He disliked her poli- tics and what she recognised as her `condescension' to lowbrow taste.

The Trollopes were gentry. Fanny was only one generation removed from trade. She never quite shook off a touch of bour- geois vulgarity. Browning warned his wife: I do hope, Fla, if you don't want to give me the greatest pain you won't receive that vulgar, pushing woman who is not fit to speak to you.

But, as Dr Neville-Sington repeatedly demonstrates, the warmth of her character always triumphed in the end.