Frances Trollope began life as a clergyman's daughter in March 1779 in the small Hampshire village of Heckfield. She shared this modest background with other women writers such as Jane Austen and Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Loss of their mothers, a solid if unfocused education directed by their fathers, and an uncertainty about marital prospects seemed conducive to the development of women writers of fiction. Frances Trollope, however, added to her accomplishments as a writer the role of traveler, an unusual one for women of her time. To be a lady traveler in the early years of the nineteenth century required a special combination of qualities--tough independence, innate curiosity about the world, and radical personal needs: in Trollope's case, desperate economic need was the immediate stimulus. But clearly she enjoyed being on the road, and in the first ten years of her developing career as a writer...