SOURCE: “The Collector and Scholar: Trollope's Girls,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 47, No. 2, Winter, 1986, pp. 229-47.

In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1982, Taylor compares the women in Trollope's novels to the female characters in the works of other male writers.

The Victorian age saw the novel reach its greatest popularity. Enormous amounts of fiction were produced, and all tastes were catered to: there was the elegant, or Silver Fork school, there was the political novel, the satiric novel, the evangelical novel, the sensation novel—and the list can be as long as you wish to make it. Whatever the underlying theme was, the novel depended for its success on plot and character. Nowadays, of course, these appear to flourish chiefly in the detective story; but in the novel's palmy days its author relied on them to please the reader and reviewer alike.

Plot and...