Trollope: A Biography

Inspired by the success of his mother, Frances Trollope, a muckraking Tory novelist who exposed the evils of slavery and child labor, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) steeled himself to produce a daily quota of words. He wrote even on trains, and rarely revised a line. The awkward, shy, abnormally sensitive youth, transformed by his years as a postal official in Ireland, became a boisterous social animal, an opinionated man of the world with ``a scorched-earth conversational style.'' In a splendid, vivacious biography, Trollopian in its genially ironic spirit, Hall, general editor of Trollope's Selected Works and editor of his Letters , peers behind the gruff public persona that protected the novelist's vulnerable inner self. Trollope, who disapproved of heroes and villains, evinced a qualified sympathy for nearly every character in his 60-plus books, each of which Hall relates to Trollope's elusive inner life and irrepressible comic sensibility. Illustrations. (Nov.)