Flying the Coop

John Sutherland

  • Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman by Pamela Neville-Sington
    Viking, 416 pp, £20.00, November 1997, ISBN 0 670 85905 2

Most male novelists have learned to read at their mothers’ knee. Only one comes to mind who learned to write novels from observing his mother. The essence of what we think of as the Trollopian method – early rising, tradesmanlike application to the task, and indomitable ‘cheerfulness’ – can be traced directly to the novelist’s novelist mother. There is a description in An Autobiography of Mrs Trollope heroically penning her light fiction to keep the wolf from the door, while her children die, one by one, from consumption:

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