“The One Great Drawback to the Life of Women is That They Cannot Act in Politics”? Political Women in Anthony Trollope’s Fiction

Abstract

Although the nineteenth century in England was dominated by the figure of the female monarch, Queen Victoria, women had virtually no political rights. The voices critical of their political impairment, notably John Stuart Mill’s The subjection of women, did not bring any significant change, so that women were granted political rights on equal terms with men as late as 1928. However, women’s political rights and their involvement in the world of politics did become an important issue, which found its way into fiction. This paper is concerned with Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister and the way he presented women who, dissatisfied with the limitations of their prescribed domestic life, got involved into politics. Although women could participate in politics only through their husbands or fathers, Trollope nevertheless represented them as powerful, if invisible, agents, grey eminences of the political life in England. Not only was the social world dominated by women a shadow of the male political world, social coteries being an equivalent of political parties, but it also influenced the political world. However, although Trollope did grant women a relatively large scope for action in his novels, he nevertheless presented them as limited by the demands of the ideology of separate spheres, especially that their too direct and indiscreet interference into the political world might meet with condemnation. Therefore, far from abolishing the boundary between the private and the public altogether, Trollope nevertheless revealed how blurry and porous it was.

The quotation in the title comes from Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1999b, p. II 26).