ABSTRACT
In 1968, Robert Polhemus in The Changing World of Anthony Trollope first seriously challenged the prevailing critical view that Trollope was unprogressive in his attitudes toward women. Polhemus’s argument relies heavily on Trollope’s pervasive sympathetic depiction of his female characters’ psychology. This emphasis is also central to Juliet McMaster’s Trollope’s Palliser Novels , which gives particular attention and admiration to the brilliance and sensitivity of Madame Max Goesler (later Mrs. Finn) in the examination of “the mind in the process of decision.” Ruth apRoberts’s touchstone essay, “Emily and Nora and Dorothy and Priscilla and Jemima and Carry” considers Trollope’s portrayal of remarkable women resisting their gender oppression in the magisterial novel of marital estrangement, He Knew He Was Right (1869). Christopher Herbert’s Trollope and Comic Pleasure declares that Trollope is “the leading and most sympathetic student of women in contemporary fiction” (75). Arguing for Trollope’s essential feminism as he analyzes Trollope’s debt to Renaissance and Jacobean comedy, Herbert claims that for Trollope, “to improve women’s standing in the world . . . would be to rejuvenate erotic pleasure” (68).
