Frances Eleanor Trollope

Frances Eleanor Trollope was a novelist, a governess to the Trollopes, and the sister who was not Dickens's mistress. She was one of three Ternan sisters, daughters of a theatrical family, and went on the stage as a child as they all did. She trained as a singer in Italy instead, and when that did not pay she took a post in Florence in 1866 as governess to the daughter of Thomas Adolphus Trollope - Anthony Trollope's elder brother, a historian of Florence who had lived in Italy for decades. The position was found for her by Dickens, who was by then living secretly with her younger sister Nelly. She married Thomas Adolphus in 1866 after his first wife died, and became a working novelist - a dozen books, serialised in Dickens's own magazine among others, and a two-volume life of her mother-in-law Frances Trollope, the woman whose Domestic Manners of the Americans had supported the whole family. That biography is still the principal source for a remarkable career. She kept her sister's secret for the rest of her life, as did everyone else who knew, and Nelly's own children learned of it only after their mother's death. Her own novels were domestic and competent and are not read now, but she was one of a fair number of women who supported households by writing them, which is a fact about the Victorian book trade rather than about her. She and Thomas Adolphus kept a house in Florence that was a fixed point for English visitors to Italy for a generation, and she wrote about the Risorgimento from inside it. She outlived him by twenty-one years and died in 1913, having watched the Victorian literature she had worked in become a subject for historians.

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