Frances Trollope

Frances Trollope began writing at fifty-two to save her family from her husband's ruin, and produced forty-one books. She was a clergyman's daughter who married a barrister with a temper and no sense, and by the late 1820s the family was insolvent. She went to America in 1827 with three of the children to join a utopian settlement in Tennessee, found it a swamp, and moved to Cincinnati to open a department store and pleasure garden that failed spectacularly. The book she wrote about the trip is the reason she matters. Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, found the republic spitting, boastful, hypocritical about slavery and unable to eat with a fork, and it was read across Europe with delight and across America with fury. The Americans invented the verb to trollope for someone who behaved badly in public. She went on writing at a rate of about two books a year, before breakfast, by a fixed routine that her son Anthony copied exactly and made famous. Several are serious: Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy is among the first industrial novels, and Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is an anti-slavery novel that preceded Uncle Tom's Cabin by sixteen years. Her husband and three of her children died of tuberculosis in the 1830s, and she nursed them while meeting deadlines. She settled in Florence and died there at eighty-three, and her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor wrote her life. Two of her sons became novelists, and Anthony's autobiography is candid that the family's survival, and his own habits of work, came from watching his mother write her way out of debt every morning before the house was up.

• Lived: 1779 CE – 1863 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: writer