Biography Essay

"I do lay claim to whatever merit should be accorded to me for persevering diligence in my profession," Anthony Trollope wrote in one of the concluding paragraphs of An Autobiography (1883). No one has ever been able to deny him that claim: as the author of some forty-seven novels, and many further volumes of travels, sketches, criticism, and short fiction, he was fully justified in his pride in the quantity of his production. He was more modest about claiming quality; but the continued sale of his many novels through a century after his death, and the increasing testimony among critics as to the power and subtlety of his work, make it clear that he did indeed achieve "the permanence of success" to which he would not himself lay claim. Among the great nineteenth-century novelists of England, he stands in critical reputation close after Jane Austen, Charles Dickens...