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lelia_t's review against another edition
3.0
One of the epigraphs Glendinning chooses is a quote from Trollope: “The man of letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography. What there is in his mind, is being declared to the world at large by himself.” Glendinning has taken this passage to heart and uses many examples from Trollope’s novels to elucidate his way of thinking. She says that in reading Trollope, she learned “how he thought about flirting, democracy, picnics, age and aging, digestion, Christmas, art and architecture, crinolines, hairstyles, dancing, wine, gardens, bad smells, illness and insanity, cigars, male friendships, spiritualism, swimming, women’s teeth and the way dinner should be served.” And - delightfully - she shares much of this with us. In fact, sometimes she shares too much, at least for me. So many examples from so many books become tiresome and distracting as we jump from novel to novel.
Glendinning cleverly takes central questions in Trollope’s books and lets them guide her writing of the biography. So his exploration in his novels of “the nature of marriage and the balance of power between the sexes” is reflected in Glendinning's examination of his marriage, his relationships with the feisty, independent-minded women he had crushes on, and his mother, who “can be seen as a feminist heroine, but she was not a comfortable mother for Anthony.”
Another theme Glendinning explores is the inner and outer man. As she writes, “The balancing of public and private, outer and inner, is a problem of all biography. It was a problem for Trollope in the management of his own life and one of his preoccupations as an author.” Glendinning does her best to reveal the inner man. She looks beneath Trollope’s “traditionally bluff, clubbish, roast-beef kind of masculinity,” so we learn about his frequently disputatious temperament and his keen awareness of life’s complexity, that there’s good in the bad and bad in the good. We meet a dreamy adolescent who told himself stories as he walked 12 miles a day to and from school. A man who liked women to be pretty and pleasant, home to be comfortable and social hierarchies to be maintained, but who typically was ill every Christmas. A boy beaten daily by the school prefect (who was also his elder brother) who grew into a man that loved the vigorous riding of the fox hunt and took courageous leaps in the dark that propelled him into a new and better life.
For Glendinning, taking on a biography of Trollope meant taking on the Victorian age, relationships between the sexes and among the classes, politics, money, contraception, the defining qualities of a gentleman and so much more. Because it’s Victoria Glendinning she did an excellent job of making unmanageable quantities of information as manageable as possible, but it was still a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless, this book is well worth reading, providing a wealth of insights and giving Trollope, so often typecast and overshadowed in his lifetime by his mother and brother, his due.
Glendinning cleverly takes central questions in Trollope’s books and lets them guide her writing of the biography. So his exploration in his novels of “the nature of marriage and the balance of power between the sexes” is reflected in Glendinning's examination of his marriage, his relationships with the feisty, independent-minded women he had crushes on, and his mother, who “can be seen as a feminist heroine, but she was not a comfortable mother for Anthony.”
Another theme Glendinning explores is the inner and outer man. As she writes, “The balancing of public and private, outer and inner, is a problem of all biography. It was a problem for Trollope in the management of his own life and one of his preoccupations as an author.” Glendinning does her best to reveal the inner man. She looks beneath Trollope’s “traditionally bluff, clubbish, roast-beef kind of masculinity,” so we learn about his frequently disputatious temperament and his keen awareness of life’s complexity, that there’s good in the bad and bad in the good. We meet a dreamy adolescent who told himself stories as he walked 12 miles a day to and from school. A man who liked women to be pretty and pleasant, home to be comfortable and social hierarchies to be maintained, but who typically was ill every Christmas. A boy beaten daily by the school prefect (who was also his elder brother) who grew into a man that loved the vigorous riding of the fox hunt and took courageous leaps in the dark that propelled him into a new and better life.
For Glendinning, taking on a biography of Trollope meant taking on the Victorian age, relationships between the sexes and among the classes, politics, money, contraception, the defining qualities of a gentleman and so much more. Because it’s Victoria Glendinning she did an excellent job of making unmanageable quantities of information as manageable as possible, but it was still a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless, this book is well worth reading, providing a wealth of insights and giving Trollope, so often typecast and overshadowed in his lifetime by his mother and brother, his due.
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