The Laurringtons

The Novel

In The Laurringtons there is a heavy country family, a broad caricature of all the self-conceit or absurdity that could be imagined in any circle. The head of the family falls in love with a fashionable young woman, a fortune-hunter, who, having married the man she hates, and has schemed to entrap, casts off her only relative, her brother — who had been less successful in their mutual speculations. She treats her husband with the utmost insolence, plunges him into debt, and then deliberately elopes from him...


The Author

Frances Milton Trollope (1779 – 1863) was an English novelist. Her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) has been the best known, but she also published strong social novels: an anti-slavery novel said to influence the work of the American Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine self-making. Her first and third sons, Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, also became writers; Anthony Trollope became respected for his social novels. She received more attention during her lifetime for what are considered several strong novels of social protest: Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836) was the first anti-slavery novel, influencing the American Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy began publication in 1840 and was the first industrial novel to be published in Britain. Other socially conscious novels included The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), which took on corruption in the Church of England and evangelical circles. 


Contemporary Reviews


Dublin Review, Vol. 15, 1843 — Boldness is indeed a great characteristic of Mrs. Trollope's writing — we mean it in no offensive sense; for it is but fair to say that it often gives a great charm — a great readableness — to her stories; — they never linger, but progress firmly and with rapidity. Her characters are boldly worked up to the intended pitch, and speak, and move, and act with freedom and decision; — qualities which attract the mind as well in fiction as reality. 


Bell's Messangers, 1844 — Those who have read Mrs. Trollope's works cannot fail to have observed that she has two leading and favourite veins of satiric humour; the ridicule of the insolence of wealth, and the more angry and satirical exhibition of the insolence of rank. She has evidently selected the story and character of this very pleasing domestic novel, in order to exercise her powers in working these two veins. Both plot and characters are well chosen and well described. It is a very pleasing and interesting work; the characters well drawn, and sustained with great dramatic force.