ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY for Local Habitations

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

Biography

Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1883. Trollope wrote his autobiography between the fall of 1875 and the spring of 1876 and consigned the manuscript to his eldest son for posthumous publication. Trollope might be the only writer of his age who has left us with an extended account of his own life and, not surprisingly, An Autobiography is as fine an example of the form as can be imagined. Everything that has been written about Trollope since 1883 – absolutely everything – has been in dialogue with the author’s own account of his life and writing practices. If you want to learn about Trollope’s life, begin here. An Autobiography is out of copyright and you can find it for free in a variety of electronic forms.* Personally, I think it’s worth reading in the Oxford paperback edition, both for the Introduction and for the other critical pieces (Trollope on Austen, Hawthorne, etc.) that round out the volume.

* Note on electronic texts: Project Gutenberg allows you to download texts in a variety of forms, including ones that will open in Kindle or iBooks.

N. John Hall. Trollope: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. This is the standard biography and is wonderfully readable. Hall edited the two-volume edition of the letters (Stanford, 1983) prior to undertaking this narrative and has secured his claim to being the primary biographer of our generation. This is a documentary rather than a critical biography, which means that it constructs Trollope’s life from sources outside the novels. Hall points to the autobiographical elements of the fiction without relying upon the novels as if they were biographical sources. The result is a life that feels entirely authoritative while at the same time pointing us in the direction of the most autobiographical moments in the fiction. Like every other of Trollope’s biographers, Hall works in the lights and shadows cast by Trollope’s own account of his life, but he doesn’t waste time arguing with Trollope over errors of fact or emphasis, concluding rather that An Autobiography’s exaggerations “embellish rather than create the story it tells.” The running titles show the chapter name as well as the years the chapter covers, so it’s very easy to thumb through the volume and find the particular time period you’re interested in reading about.

Super, R.H. The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1988. Super undertook this project after Hall edited the letters but before Hall published what has become the standard biography. Super’s aim was to document everything that he could about Trollope’s life. My own opinion is that this is most valuable as a reference work. I did not find it especially readable. Not so with Super’s other book (see below).

Mullen, Richard. Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World. London: Duckworth, 1990. As his title implies, Mullen seeks to situate Trollope’s writing in a variety of contexts. For example, he writes an instructive chapter on how Trollope reflected or responded to Victorian reading habits and publishing practices. Another chapter addresses God, religion, and the church – especially useful for an author who spent as much time writing about the clergy as did Trollope. I found Mullen more valuable on the contexts than on Trollope himself.

Glendinning, Victoria. Anthony Trollope. London: Hutchinson, 1992. New York: Knopf, 1992. Glendinning is known as a biographer (Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, Vita Sackville-West, etc.) rather than as a Trollope scholar. Unbeknownst to her, Hall, Super, and Mullen were also working on full-length biographies of her subject and their books appeared before hers. But as she points out in her Introduction, this is the only Trollope biography written by a woman and its emphasis on family relationships and the women in Trollope’s life is most welcome. People who find academic biographies tough going will welcome this one which is popular in the best sense of that term.

Super, R.H. Trollope in the Post Office. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981. Trollope had a distinguished career as a civil servant in the Post Office and Super has done an invaluable service in documenting this part of the life. The book is short (under 100 pages of text) and contains two useful appendices: the first lists everything Trollope had to say (outside of letters and An Autobiography) about the civil service; the second is a calendar of his principal literary works that distills information about dates of composition and publication and puts all of it (at least what was known in 1981) into one convenient list.

Sadleir, Michael. Trollope: A Commentary. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927; rev., New York: Farrar, Straus, 1947. Sadleir wrote what is often called the first modern biography of Trollope at a time (1927) when he had fallen into obscurity in England and was kept alive by American bibliophiles. Modern biographers owe Sadleir a debt but this work is, as the title announces, a “commentary” rather than a biography. If you want an overview of Trollope’s corpus with astute commentary, you can’t do better than to begin with Sadleir, but he won’t take you as far as the biographers will.

C.P. Snow. Trollope: His Life and Art. New York: Scribner’s, 1975. This is a short, heavily illustrated, decidedly non-academic biography that is a delight from first to last. Not only is Snow very good on Trollope, but he’s especially useful for the context that he provides. I learned a tremendous amount about Trollope’s England from reading it.

GEORGE ELIOT

Biography

Cross, J.W., ed. George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals. 3 Vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885. The first attempt at a biography of Eliot, written by her husband (whom she married quite late in life) and based on original documents, many of which, curiously, did not survive the publication of these volumes. Virginia Woolf called it “the sad soliloquy in which Mr Cross condemned her to tell the story of her life.” It’s on this list because it is so often referred to by other biographers and critics. I own a lovely first edition, bound in leather with handsome endpapers and gilt on all edges. But I don’t recommend actually reading it.

Haight, Gordon. George Eliot: A Biography. New York: Oxford, 1968. The standard biography, never superseded. There are more recent critical biographies (see Ashton below), but no new documentary ones.

Haight, Gordon. Selections from George Eliot’s Letters. New Haven: Yale, 1985. Between 1954 and 1978, Yale published nine volumes of Eliot’s letters. Haight’s method here, as he explains in the preface, was not to select dozens of individual letters but rather to select the most interesting parts of hundreds of letters so as to provide a continuous narrative of the life and the essential details of the writing and publication of the novels.

Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. London: Penguin, 1996. A critical (as opposed to a documentary) biography. Ashton is very good on the people surrounding Eliot, especially the Hennells and the Brays. She expands upon and rounds out much of the material that Haight treats at shorter length. While there is little here that is new, this is a smart and readable biography.

Ashton, Rosemary. G.H. Lewes: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Lewes was deserving of a biography in his own right and not just as Eliot’s life partner, but he didn’t get one until Ashton undertook it.

Hardy, Barbara. George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Barbara Hardy is one of the best known Eliot scholars. This project, part of the Writers’ Lives series, is an abbreviated version of Ashton’s project described above, i.e., the life described through the works.

James, Henry. “The Life of George Eliot.” Partial Portrait. London: Macmillan, 1894. A full digital version is available here: https://archive.org/stream/partialportraits00jameiala#page/n7/mode/2up

BACKGROUND

Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962. This is what the scholars call a locus classicus of literary criticism that we return to again and again, if only to disagree. Leavis makes this list as a holdover from my earlier course on Daniel Deronda, largely because of his opinion that the Gwendolen Harleth parts of that novel should have been separated from the rest. He of course thinks that George Eliot helped to establish “the great tradition” and that Trollope was entirely outside it. The more fool he.

Sutherland, J.A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: Athlone, 1976. For anyone interested in how Victorian novels were published, this volume is indispensable. Eliot’s last novels were too long and complex for serialization and were written at a time when publishers were rebelling against the economic model imposed upon them by Mudie’s lending library. (Most patrons paid an annual subscription fee. Triple-deckers allowed the library to serve three customers at a time.) Enter Middlemarch, which was published in eight books at two-month intervals, each book selling for 5s. This was fundamentally the publishing scheme for Daniel Deronda as well.

Trollope, Anthony. Clergymen of the Church of England. London: Chapman and Hall, 1866; rpt. Leicester University Press, 1974. These essays, which originally appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1865 (just as he was beginning The Last Chronicle of Barset) are a helpful footnote to all of Trollope’s writing about clergy.

Chadwick, Owen. The Victorian Church, 3rd edition, 2 vols. London: A & C Black, 1971; rpt SCM Press, Ltd., 1987. This is the authoritative account of the Church in England in the nineteenth century. The first volume covers 1829-1859 and the second 1860-1901. Everything that comes up in our novels is glossed here and Chadwick is a superb writer. Chadwick begins with Catholic emancipation and the threat it posed to the established Church, and then moves forward through major sections including the Oxford Movement, the dissenters and evangelicals and moves on in Part Two to the relationship between science and religion, history and the Bible, doubt. The section on the village church with its chapter on the country parson might be of special interest to readers of Trollope. Chadwick is as entertaining as he is informative.