ABSTRACT

Anthony Trollope’s novel He Knew He Was Right (1869) is a story of the imperial self run amok. In this very long novel telling of an upper-class Englishman’s marriage to a dark woman from the colonies and their subsequent violent estrangement, Trollope painstakingly shows the destructive nature of the masculine English will to power, the unrelenting efforts at dominion that he calls “civilization gone mad.” 1 He Knew He Was Right has been praised for its powerful indictment of gender oppression ever since Robert Polhemus stated that “behind all the male resentment of female emancipation in the last century lies conscious or unconscious panic at the idea of equal sexual freedom for women.” 2 Ruth apRoberts’s germinal article “Emily and Nora and Dorothy and Priscilla and Jemima and Carry” examined Trollope’s sympathies with Victorian women in detail and first connected He Knew He Was Right to the parliamentary debates in which John Stuart Mill argued for women’s rights. 3 Christopher Herbert, Jane Nardin, and I entered this discussion of the novel, and Margaret Markwick continued it in Trollope and Women . 4 Lisa Surridge contributed to the debate in the “Trollope” chapter of her book Bleak Houses, in which she examines marital violence in Victorian novels. Kathy Psomiades’s essay in The Politics of Gender argues that He Knew He Was Right—published in the same year as Mill’s The Subjection of Women—is a cultural site in which 1860s tensions between sexual relations and Liberalism are encoded, “one of the places where the story of the sexual contract emerges.” 5