Volume 39, Number 10 · May 28, 1992
In Trollopeshire
By Robert Bernard Martin
Trollope: A Biography
by N. John Hall
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 581 pp., $35.00
Trollope: An Illustrated Biography
by C. P. Snow
New Amsterdam, 191 pp., $21.95 (paper)
The Landleaguers
by Anthony Trollope, edited by R.H. Super
University of Michigan Press, 341 pp., $15.95 (paper)
A good many Victorian writers forbade biographies of themselves, or else their executors did all they could to make them impossible to write. Billows of smoke, for instance, merge with our picture of Hardy, redolent from the bonfires of his papers at Max Gate, leaving behind only a faked biography, supposedly by his widow, and several volumes of letters with about as much interest as the laundry lists Catherine finds in Northanger Abbey. Matthew Arnold insisted that there should be no life of him. Tennyson feared being 'ripped like a pig' by outsiders, and kept it in the family by turning over the writing of his biography to his adoring son. The day after Hopkins's death an 'old fellow, all in black' was busy tearing papers out of a chest of drawers and piling them on a blazing grate at University College, Dublin. Of course the biographies appeared all the same, but their writers had been led a merry chase.
Review, 4606 words
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