Frances Milton Trollope

Frances Milton Trollope, also known as Fanny Trollope (10 March 1779 – 6 October 1863), was an English novelist who wrote as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), observations from a trip to the United States, is the best known.

She also wrote social novels: one against slavery is said to have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she also wrote the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels, which used a Protestant position to examine self-making.

Some recent scholars note that modernist critics have omitted women writers such as Frances Trollope. In 1839, The New Monthly Magazine claimed, "No other author of the present day has been at once so read, so much admired, and so much abused".

Two of her sons, Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, became writers, as did her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope (née Ternan), second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope.

Born at Stapleton, Bristol, Frances was the third daughter and middle child of the Reverend William Milton and Mary Milton (née Gresley). Frances was five years old when her mother died in childbirth. Her father was remarried to Sarah Partington of Clifton in 1800. She was baptised at St Michael's, Bristol, on 17 March 1779. As a child, Frances read a great amount of English, French and Italian literature. She and her sister later moved to Bloomsbury, London, in 1803 to live with their brother, Henry Milton, who was employed in the War Office.

In London, she met Thomas Anthony Trollope, a barrister. At the age of 30, she married him on 23 May 1809 in Heckfield, Hampshire. They had four sons and three daughters: Thomas Adolphus, Henry, Arthur (who died in 1824), Emily (who died in a day), Anthony, Cecilia, and Emily. When the Trollopes moved to a leased farm at Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1817, they faced financial struggles for lack of agricultural expertise. This was where Frances gave birth to her last two children. Two of her sons and one daughter also became writers. Her eldest surviving son, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, wrote mostly histories: The Girlhood of Catherine de Medici, History of Florence, What I Remember, Life of Pius IX, and some novels. Her fourth son Anthony Trollope became a well-known and received novelist, establishing a strong reputation, especially for his serial novels, such as those set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, and his political series the Palliser novels. Cecilia Trollope Tilley published a novel in 1846.

Despite producing six living children, the Trollopes' marriage was reputedly unhappy.

Soon after the move to the leased farm, her marital and financial strains led Frances to seek companionship and aid from Fanny Wright, ward of the French hero Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. In 1824 she visited La Grange, Lafayette's estate in France. Over the next three years, she made several other visits to France and was inspired to take an American excursion with Wright. Frances thought of America as a simple economic venture and figured that she could save money by sending her children through Wright's communal school, as Wright had planned to reform the education of African American children and the formerly enslaved on their property in Tennessee. In November 1827, Frances Trollope went with some of her family to Fanny Wright's utopian community Nashoba Commune in the United States. She took her son, Henry, and her two daughters, Charlotte and Emily. Her husband, Thomas Anthony, and remaining sons, Tom and Anthony, stayed at home and continued their education. In October 1828, Tom and his father joined Frances in Cincinnati, leaving Anthony at boarding school. They returned to England in January 1829.