Authors Like Anthony Trollope

Jane Austen

British · Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817)

Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon in Hampshire, where her father was the rector, and died in Winchester in 1817, aged 41. Her six novels follow young women of the gentry and the clergy through courtship, in a world where a husband’s income can decide a whole life. In An Autobiography Trollope recalled deciding as a young man that Pride and Prejudice was the best novel in the English language.

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Honoré de Balzac

French · Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot (1835), Lost Illusions (1837–1843)

Balzac was born in Tours in 1799 and died in Paris in 1850. He gathered around ninety novels and stories into La Comédie humaine, a portrait of French society after Napoleon, and from Le Père Goriot onwards he brought characters such as the ambitious Eugène de Rastignac back from book to book. Money drives almost every plot: dowries, debts, inheritances and speculation.

William Makepeace Thackeray

British · Vanity Fair (1847–1848), The History of Henry Esmond (1852)

Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811 and died in London in 1863. Vanity Fair, subtitled “A Novel without a Hero”, follows the penniless Becky Sharp as she climbs through English society in the years around Waterloo. As editor of the new Cornhill Magazine he encouraged Trollope to write for it, and Framley Parsonage was serialised there from 1860. In 1879 Trollope published a short book about him.

Charles Dickens

British · Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861)

Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and died in Kent in 1870. His novels attack institutions: the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, the debtors’ prison and the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. In The Warden (1855) Trollope mocked him as “Mr Popular Sentiment”, a novelist who turns a public scandal into a tearjerker. Dickens’s treatment of his wife Catherine, whom he left in 1858, has damaged his reputation; letters published in 2019 indicate he tried to have her committed to an asylum.

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Elizabeth Gaskell

British · Cranford (1853), North and South (1855), Wives and Daughters (1866)

Gaskell was born in London in 1810, grew up in Knutsford in Cheshire and married a Unitarian minister in Manchester. Cranford is a comedy of genteel women in a small town modelled on Knutsford, while North and South sets a clergyman’s daughter among the Manchester mill owners. She died in 1865 before finishing Wives and Daughters, which was published the following year.

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Margaret Oliphant

Scottish · Salem Chapel (1863), The Perpetual Curate (1864), Miss Marjoribanks (1866)

Oliphant was born near Musselburgh in 1828 and died in Wimbledon in 1897. Left a widow with young children, she wrote more than 120 books, from novels to histories, to support her family. Her Chronicles of Carlingford, serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine in the 1860s, are set in a provincial English town divided between church and chapel; Miss Marjoribanks follows a doctor’s daughter who sets out to organise its society.

George Eliot

British · Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871–1872)

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born in Warwickshire in 1819; she died in London in 1880. Middlemarch, published in eight parts, follows the marriages and careers of a Midlands town around the time of the 1832 Reform Act, from an idealistic young woman who marries a dry elderly scholar to an ambitious doctor who falls into debt.

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Edith Wharton

American · The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920)

Wharton was born into a wealthy New York family in 1862 and died in France in 1937. Her novels dissect old New York society and the new money pushing into it: Lily Bart in The House of Mirth cannot afford to marry for love, and Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country marries her way upwards through a series of husbands. The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, in 1921.

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Barbara Pym

British · Excellent Women (1952), A Glass of Blessings (1958), Quartet in Autumn (1977)

Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, in 1913 and died in 1980. Her comedies of curates, jumble sales and unmarried women in church congregations went out of fashion, and her publisher turned her down in 1963. In 1977 Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both named her one of the most underrated writers of the century in the Times Literary Supplement, and Quartet in Autumn was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year.

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Joanna Trollope

British · The Choir (1988), A Village Affair (1989), The Rector’s Wife (1991)

Joanna Trollope was born in 1943 in her grandfather’s rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, and Anthony Trollope was her fifth-generation uncle. The Choir, her first contemporary novel, is set around a cathedral choir; The Rector’s Wife, about a clergyman’s wife who takes a job to escape the parish, displaced Jeffrey Archer from the top of the hardback bestseller list. Critics labelled her books “Aga sagas”; she has called them “quite subversive, quite bleak”.