SOURCE: “‘Something Both More and Less Than Manliness’: Gender and the Literary Reception of Anthony Trollope,” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 22, 1994, pp. 151-71.

In the following essay, Thompson investigates the way in which Victorian conceptions of gender influenced the way Trollope's work was reviewed by his contemporaries.

“We state our opinion of it [Barchester Towers] as decidedly the cleverest novel of the season, and one of the most masculine delineations of modern life … that we have seen for many a day”—Westminster Review 1857

“My husband, who can seldom get a novel to hold him, has been held by all three [The Warden, Barchester Towers, and The Three Clerks], and by this [The Three Clerks] the strongest. … What a thoroughly man's book it is! I much admire it.”—Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1859, qtd. in Smalley 64

“We may say, on the whole, that Thackeray was written for men and...