ABSTRACT

Trollope’s 1850 novel La Vendée , about the conservative rural resistance to the French Revolution in the early 1790s, has received little attention from critics. Indeed, much of the extant analysis of the book has occurred in biographies of Trollope, which have had to cover the book both out of comprehensiveness and due to its early place in the Trollope oeuvre and its pivotal role in his development as novelist. R. H. Super pointed out that, for all that the novel “failed” (57) it was nonetheless the first Trollope novel “in which he gave titles to his chapters” (56), an important formal feature of his mature work. Super (58) castigates La Vendée for featuring “a mass of characters” going “through a mass of events” but in truth there are no more than ten significant characters. Super also cautioned against seeing the failure of the book as that of historical fiction in general, pointing out Charles Dickens had a huge success just slightly later with A Tale of Two Cities . Victoria Glendinning says that La Vendée “was not to be the lucky shot” (173) that would put Trollope’s career map, although she does acknowledge that the novel foreshadowed Trollope’s political interests. N. John Hall (112) refers to a “one-sidedness” in the book, but that is something that Trollope arguably tries but fails to achieve there.