Women in Trollope's Palliser Novels (Nineteenth-Century Studies)

The "Woman Question" - the controversy over women's proper "nature and mission" - was an issue that permeated both Victorian mores and the literature of that period. Ideals of Victorian womanhood were dependent upon certain assumptions about the "gentlemanly ethic" - the superiority of men in the public sphere as women were forced to settle for limited self-realization, sacrificing public aspirations in favor of private fulfillment in a marriage of equals. Previous studies of Anthony Trollope's writings suggest that Trollope was comfortable with the conventions of the gender roles of his times, that he cherished a belief about the centrality of gentlemen and the landed estate to the stability of the social structure in England. Author Deborah Denenholz Morse challenges this view with a careful consideration of Trollope's second fiction-sequence, his Palliser novels, focusing especially on Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke's Children.