The American Senator Author:Anthony Trollope From the back of the book: — Many Trollope fans are aware that Trollope?s mother Frances gained fame as a writer by criticizing America (Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1831); few modern fans have ever had the opportunity to read her son?s views on this country as delineated in such rare novels as The American Senator (1877). — The character of... more » an American politician lecturing the English on their faults gives Trollope his chance to compare the two cultures; still, it must have been Trollopean irony which urged the author of The American Senator to adopt that title ?very much in opposition to my publishers,? he says in his Autobiography. For in this masterly but practically unknown novel from Trollope?s later period, the visiting Senator, Elias Gotobed from the state of ?Mickewa,? serves as comic relief to a stunningly sharp drama of feminine cynicism and calculation on the English marriage market.
While Senator Gotobed analyzes England in his typically blunt, naively daring manner, the true focal point of the story, heroine/villainess Arabella Trefoil, develops into one of the most complex and successfully realized of all Trollope?s women. Her coldly enacted, yet oddly heroic pursuit of Lord Rufford, while she is simultaneously engaged to John Morton, spurs Trollope to the extraordinary reaches of ironic perception. The American Senator pokes his inquisitive nose into these and other doings of Dillsborough, through whose citizens Trollope creates another English village world. Mary Masters and her two lovers of unequal birth, the local fox-hunt club, and the neighboring gentry provide the frame for one of Trollope?s full-length mirrors of Victorian England.« less