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Badosa.com is proud to announce the first publication in ebook form of the fascinating Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. The book by the Victorian author is a literary biography. Trollope writes about his miserable childhood and about his parents, but, above all, he writes about writing.
“it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round me, have done in literature; of my failures and successes such as they have been, and their causes; and of the opening which a literary career offers to men and women for the earning of their bread.”
Trollope understands literature as a craftsmanship and his Autobiography could be called “A Memoir of the Craft.” He talks with insight about his books and his contemporaries, like Thackery, Eliot, or Dickens, and about the building of a career in the literary world: his early rejections, his relationship with publishers, the economics of publishing. The book is full of advice for the aspiring writer and is a pleasurable reading experience even for the reader not acquainted with Trollope’s novels.
This edition includes a subject index and an author index. Some issues selected from the subject index are:
In his parallel career as a writer, Trollope did not began to earn any money by literary work till his forth book, The Warden (1855). The novel is the first in a series of realistic works about ordinary men and women set in the imaginary English county of Barsetshire. The other titles in the series are Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1967). He is also the author of the Palliser series, a sequence of political novels on British Parliamentary life: Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876), and The Duke’s Children (1880).
Anthony Trollope published more than 60 books (novels, travel books, short stories, essays). He died in London on December 6, 1882. His last novel, Mr. Scarborough’s Family, and his Autobiography were published in 1883.
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In writing these pages, which, for the want of a better name, I shall be fain to call the autobiography of so insignificant a person as myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round me, have done in literature; of my failures and successes such as they have been, and their causes; and of the opening which a literary career offers to men and women for the earning of their bread. And yet the garrulity of old age, and the aptitude of a man’s mind to recur to the passages of his own life, will, I know, tempt me to say something of myself;—nor, without doing so, should I know how to throw my matter into any recognised and intelligible form. That I, or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible. Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing? Who is there that has done none? But this I protest:—that nothing that I say shall be untrue. I will set down naught in malice; nor will I give to myself, or others, honour which I do not believe to have been fairly won. My boyhood was, I think, as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be, my misfortunes arising from a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on the part of my father, and from an utter want on my part of the juvenile manhood which enables some boys to hold up their heads even among the distresses which such a position is sure to produce.
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