SOURCE: “Women in The Way We Live Now,” English Studies in Canada, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 68-80.

In the following essay, McMaster evaluates Trollope's treatment of female characters in The Way We Live Now, revealing a more pro-feminist attitude than Trollope is generally known for.

Criticism dealing with Trollope's views about women is a hardy perennial despite the fact that his more celebrated statements are unambiguous.¹ “The necessity of the supremacy of man is as certain to me as the eternity of the soul,”² he says. Or of Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? he says, “her mind had become filled with some undefined idea of the importance to her of her own life. What should a woman do with her life? There had arisen round her a flock of learned ladies asking that question, to whom it seems that the proper answer has never yet occurred...