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.