SOURCE: Tilghman, Christopher. “Innocents Abroad.” Washington Post Book World 32, no. 25 (23 June 2002): 9.

In the following review, Tilghman criticizes Trollope for failing to accurately portray the life and culture of the American South in Girl from the South.

How the English regard the American deep South—indeed, what they know of its distinctive surviving characteristics—is a source of speculation for many of us. When a novelist with a fine sense of what Flannery O'Connor called the mystery and manners of ordinary life takes on the task, we can read with special interest. The English novelist Joanna Trollope is certainly a strong candidate, and her new novel, Girl from the South, is an entertaining chronicle of several well-realized ordinary lives, but the central question promised by the plot remains unexplored.

Part of the problem—if indeed it is a problem for Trollope's many readers—is that the story is built...