A Charming Fellow

Frances Eleanor Trollope, nėe Ternan, was born in August 1835 on board a paddle steamer in Delaware Bay in the United States. After an introduction by Charles Dickens she became the governess to the child of Thomas Adolphus Trollope, the brother to the more famed Anthony. Within months they had married and settled on a new life together in Rome. It was from here that Frances elevated her talents to become a full member of the Trollope writing dynasty. Her fiction is peopled by eccentric cosmopolitan Londoners, Italian and French visitors, and motherless, bright, and educated young women trying to carve out niches for themselves within the boundaries of the middle and upper-middle classes, with varying degrees of success. Although her work was fashionable at the time it fell into obscurity after her death but is now becoming the subject of growing interest and deservedly so.