SOURCE: Button, Marilyn D. “Reclaiming Mrs. Frances Trollope: British Abolitionist and Feminist.” CLA Journal 38, no. 1 (September 1994): 69-86.

In the following essay, Button discusses feminist and antislavery themes in Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, which she asserts was the first English novel to attack slavery in the United States.

In spite of recent critical attention which has convincingly demonstrated the breadth of Mrs. Frances Trollope's literary achievement, she remains confined in the contemporary popular imagination as the vitriolic narrator of Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and critic par excellence of nineteenth-century American morals and culture.¹ Her reputation, it seems, has been limited to this focus despite the fact that by her death in 1863 at the age of eighty-four, she had a firmly established international reputation as the able author of thirty-four novels, six travel journals, several verse dramas, and two long narrative poems. Her...