Truth and Fiction in Trollope's Autobiography

Abstract

Trollope's lively Autobiography has dominated scholarly writing about him not only among his biographers but among critics as well, all of whom incline to regard as factual whatever he has told of his life. But the evidence of such sources as his correspondence, his travel diaries, and his writing schedules, as well as relevant articles in nineteenth-century periodicals, discloses that the facts often differed significantly from the account he gives in the story of his life. Events did not always take place as he remembered them. The aim of this essay is to point explicitly to certain statements in An Autobiography that are often repeated as factual by scholars, but that in truth were erroneous recollections of what happened.