While she was the author of thirty-four novels, Frances Trollope has been more known as the mother of Anthony Trollope and as the author of a best-selling travel book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), than for her achievements in fiction. Yet she was a significant pioneer in expanding the art of fiction in the nineteenth century with her controversial social-reform novels and her many works featuring a new, strong kind of heroine. In using fiction to attack social abuses and in developing more complex characterizations of women, Mrs. Trollope was an influence on the major novelists of the time. Like many of her heroines, she was the "triumphant feminine" in both a personal and a literary sense.

Born Frances Milton , she was a Bristol clergyman's daughter who lost her mother early, a pattern shared by many other nineteenth-century female authors. Educated by her father in languages, the classics...