SOURCE: “Romantic Elements and Aesthetic Distance in Trollope's Fiction,” Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall, 1981, pp. 395-405.

In the following essay, Eastwood traces the literary sources of the romantic ideals in Trollope's short stories and novels and argues that Trollope encouraged his audience to regard all aspects of his fiction, including romance, in a realistic manner.

Many of Anthony Trollope's realistic fictional works are built around episodes in the lives of characters who explicitly are, were, or would like to be (or who seem to be, but are really not) romantically predisposed. Whereas his short stories often focus entirely on the romantic qualities of aspirations, sentiments, ideals, fantasies, courtships, and sacrifices, in Trollope's novels these elements are absorbed into a larger social context and are generally subordinated to the scores of other things presented. Therefore, because responses to romantic conventions usually appear more emphatically and more frequently...