Introduction

The title Reforming Trollope is a double entendre: it points not only to Trollope the reformer but also to the reform of Trollope scholarship in relation to discourses of gender, race, and genre. This book proposes a Trollope that would have been unthinkable until recently: Trollope the reformer. Unlike Henry James’s “safe” novelist, Reforming Trollope identifies a writer who makes us feel unsettled, a Trollope who is decidedly not Nathaniel Hawthorne’s or Simon Gikandi’s quintessential Englishman, but rather a well-traveled, sophisticated cosmopolite who wrote radical critiques of the English cultural and legal institution of primogeniture and of English race discourses. Moreover, in seeing Trollope’s fiction as experimental and innovative, Reforming Trollope questions Hawthorne’s praise of Trollope as a “transparent” realist.