SOURCE: "Trollope as a Short Story Writer," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 1, June, 1976, pp. 26-47.

In the essay below, Stone provides a comprehensive survey of Trollope's short fiction, noting that the stories are often less substantial and serious than the author's novels.

Anthony Trollope's stories constitute a substantial and substantially ignored portion of his prodigious output. He began writing them after having established, in his mid-forties, a reputation as author of the first three Barsetshire novels; and with the great success of Framley Parsonage in 1860, editors of Victorian middlebrow magazines began to importune him for short works bearing his name. To his young American friend, Kate Field, who had sent him one of her short stories for criticism, Trollope offered a formula for storytelling which demonstrates how modestly he may have regarded his own practice, at least in the beginning stages: "Tell some simple plot or story of...