The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years, and are now widely studied. In this four-volume set her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage provides an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time.

The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years, and are now widely studied. This four-volume set includes scholarly editions of her four novels, in which her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage is an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time. At the time of their reception all four novels were considered to be the most hilarious and beloved of Trollope’s works. In their satire of Victorian marriage, they challenged and complicated the normative practices of getting married, being married, and getting married again. Trollope’s creation of strong, independent, older women is an antidote to other Victorian novelists’ portrayal of widows and spinsters, and her novels challenge our understanding of the characteristics of the novels of the 1830s and 1840s, especially in their depiction of Victorian gender dynamics as well as their influence on succeeding novels.

The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years, and are now widely studied. In this four-volume set her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage provides an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time.

The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years, and are now widely studied. In this four-volume set her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage provides an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time.

The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years, and are now widely studied. In this four-volume set her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage provides an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time.

Domestic Manners of the Americans is an entertaining, witty, and often scathing account of Trollope's travels in America between 1827 and 1832 and her criticisms of American manners, from vulgarity to the treatment of slaves. One of the most influential travel books of the century, it also speaks to political debates on equality in England.

Long overshadowed by her more widely read and reprinted son Anthony, Frances Trollope is almost exclusively remembered for her travel writing and especially for the notoriously controversial Domestic Manners of the Americans. Her impressively prolific career as a writer, however, covered and transgressed several genres, and spanned the early 1830s right through until the mid-1850s. A contemporary of Jane Austen, Trollope wrote social-problem novels about industrial England and satirical exposures of evangelical Christianity, as well as writing the first anti-slavery novel. She was a controversial, yet popular and prolific, writer who lived on her works, while using them to vent her outrage at various social and cultural developments of the time. A reassessment of her position in nineteenth-century literary culture brings to attention her own versatility as well as the various ways in which the pressing issues of the time could be represented and, in turn, helped to form Victorian literature. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Women's Writing.