ABSTRACT
Anthony Trollope was a “titanic” talent, 2 but a writer so prolific that it’s hard to see and keep in mind the full range of his accomplishment. With his forty-seven novels – most of them good – plus all those stories and nonfiction books, who can read it all, much less take it in with the attention it deserves? Like filmmaker Woody Allen or novelist Philip Roth, Trollope is a master who just keeps on keeping on and doing it well. But people fall behind, can’t keep up, and so invent reasons not to. The big critical problem in dealing with major artists who never stop is not that they repeat themselves, but that they don’t: they move on, try new things, and upset conventional takes and easy generalizations. Lack of “close reading” often leads to the sloppiness of closed reading. It’s hard to describe the sprawling big picture of Trollope’s whole wordy world without oversimplifying – without distorting or missing the rich complexities and contradictions of his genius.
