Trollope’s Honesty

Anthony Trollope is famous among realists for having a disappearing style that seems to provide unmediated access to the represented world. However, the moralization of Trollope’s style as honest and transparent leads to misleading accounts of his stylistic achievement. By recovering Trollope’s neglected philosophy of style as found in An Autobiography, Thackeray, and The Life of Cicero, and examining practical examples from the novel Can You Forgive Her?, this essay shows how the “virtues” of Trollope’s style—namely ease, lucidity, and harmony—are often motivated by nonmimetic concerns that mark the style with uniquely aesthetic aspects.