ABSTRACT
In Lot’s Daughters (2005), I identify and analyze this Lot complex and try to make clear how, as it develops in history, it pervades, generates, and illuminates life, language, literature, and art.1 I didn’t discuss Trollope there, but I want to now: he and the Lot complex fit together beautifully. As I read the Lot syndrome in the Victorian and modern world, it represents, in various ways, the drive or compulsion, in an age of growing female emancipation, to preserve, adapt, and/ or expropriate the traditional paternal power to sustain, regenerate, define, and transmit life and civilization-the patriarchal seed of culture. And that’s what I see in Trollope. His fiction pulses with the sometimes muted but insistent rhythm of women’s quest for authority.
