Fanny Trollope The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman By Pamela Neville-Sington Viking. 416 pp. $29.95 Reviewed by Audrey Foote, a Washington writer and lecturer on European drama. Sunday, December 6, 1998

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This is one of the lesser complaints in her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in London in 1832. "It succeeded in angering Americans far more than any book written by a foreign observer before or since," says the Oxford Companion to American History -- presumably even more than Charles Dickens's scathing American Notes, a decade later, which had even more fun with the portly sows and gentleman hogs trotting up Broadway.

Though this British Tory did commend a few persons, some architecture and the natural beauty of the country, she was shocked by our manners, morals, customs and institutions: "one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves," the mistreatment of Indians, religious hysteria, and sharp business practices. And she was dismayed by the ignorance and insipidity of most women, and the rough talk and table manners of the ubiquitous "generals, colonels and majors": "the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured . . . the loathesome spitting . . . the frightful manner of feeding with their knives till the whole blade seemed to enter their mouths, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth after with a pocket knife."

Despite Fanny Trollope's fame -- or notoriety -- in her lifetime, her 42 published books, and the three biographies of her even before this excellent and probably definitive one, she is usually identified as the mother of Anthony, an equally prolific but more artful novelist. The youngest and healthiest of Fanny's six children, Anthony was no doubt neglected, and later tended to denigrate her both as a mother and a writer. However -- gallant compensation -- he supposedly used her as the model for one of his most attractive heroines, Lady Glencora Palliser.

Fanny's other five children and the many famous friends (Mme. Recamier, Lafayette, Metternich) whom she acquired by sheer wit and charm seem to have considered her cheerful, resilient, a patient wife and devoted mother. As a country vicar's lively daughter, and by 1808 the fiancee of Thomas Anthony Trollope, a London barrister of good family and great expectations, Fanny had reason to anticipate at least the comfortable life of a Jane Austen heroine. At first all went well: a fine house, social life, children. But as the family and expenses increased, their income dwindled with Thomas's worsening health and irascible temper. The crucial blow (a quite common event in English fiction and real life) was their loss in 1819 of a large inheritance to an uncle's unexpected new heir.

It was at the invitation of her friend Frances Wright, a rich, radical Scot who had published her own book on America in 1821 and had started a colony to free slaves there, that Fanny at age 52 decided to try her luck in the United States. She took along two little daughters, an artist protege and a son she hoped to place in business. During her three years of travels, her husband sent what money he could spare, made several visits and some unwise decisions. On the basis of several minor successes, Fanny built in Cincinnati an exotic and grandiose museum-bazaar, for which Thomas shipped from England the shoddiest merchandise, to her dismay. The structure was known for decades after as Trollope's Folly; it ruined them.

But America was also their salvation, though not as they expected. Desperate, Fanny decided the only way she still might make money from America would be to write about it. Back in London, that wit and sharp eye established Fanny's career. After the success of her first book, she went on to process her own memories, experience, imagination and voyages into 41 more books -- fiction, travels, verse -- clever enough to support her family but not to endure into this century.

She wrote while shuttling between England and Europe to contact important, useful friends, to seek out cheaper lodgings, or to locate a better doctor or a milder climate for the current invalid. When home, she nursed her ill husband till his death in 1835, and then each of four children who died slowly of consumption.

Her devotion, energy and extraordinary resilience were much remarked. So it is a pleasure to learn that, by another fluke inheritance, this gallant woman spent her final decade (she died at age 84) with her family in the Villino Trollope, a splendid house in Florence, with terraces, gardens and a great library of rare books. On hearing of this good fortune, the English novelist Mary Russell Mitford, who had known Fanny from childhood, wrote "You have well earned the happiness domestic & social which you enjoy, dear friend." Amen!

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