SOURCE: Aguirre, Robert D. “Cold Print: Professing Authorship in Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography.” Biography 25, no. 4 (fall 2002): 569-92.

In the following essay, Aguirre probes the relationship between the writer, authorial identity, and the realities of the literary marketplace with regard to Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography.

Trollope's An Autobiography is an anomaly, a work of self-representation best known for its frank view of the literary marketplace: “Brains that are unbought will never serve the public much” (107).¹ Such disquieting candor has led critics to posit not one autobiography but two—the real thing and a poor relation. The first tells a familiar Victorian story of a sensitive and self-conscious child's journey through poverty and social exclusion. Like Dickens, whose biography he had read (Trollope, Letters 2: 557), Trollope here succumbs to the “famous Victorian novelist hysteria syndrome,” in which authors “rewrite the past with themselves as lonely victims” (Sutherland, “Unhappy” 20). The second turns...