'... a people so chained up' : Frances Trollope and Italy

Abstract

The central focus of my paper is the travelogue A Visit to Italy (1842) by Frances Trollope, one of the most remarkable and controversial personalities of Victorian England, especially if we consider the way she was almost forced to enter upon a journalistic and literary career. Indeed, she began writing when she was over fifty as a consequence of her husband's repeated financial disasters. Thus, in default of her husband's role as paterfamilias, in order to support her family, she wrote and published in all 114 books, mainly travelogues but also novels of some success. As is well known, Frances Milton Trollope was the mother of Anthony Trollope whose fiction, in many respects, dominated the literary market in the second half of the nineteenth century.