Included here for his Banagher association. Anthony (1812-1882), English novelist. Living in Ireland as a Post Office surveyor and later inspector between 1841 and 1859, he worked out of Banagher, Co. Offaly, and Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. After an unhappy childhood and some years drudging in London, Ireland liberated Trollope from asthma, gave him the impetus to start writing, and introduced him to his lifelong passion for hunting, as he relates in his Autobiography (1883). He attuned himself to Irish life by reading Maria Edgeworth, as well as William Carleton, John and Michael Banim, and Gerald Griffin. In his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), deals with the tragedy that overwhelms a reduced Catholic gentry family.

In The Kellys and the Kellys (1848), departing from a powerful account of Daniel O'Connell's state trial in Dublin, 1844, he sets an upper-class love-story in Dunmore, Co. Galway, among the landed families of ascendancy Ireland, depicting with remarkable precision the social gradations of contemporary Irish society. Neither of these novels was successful, and he did not take up an Irish subject again until his permanent return to England. Castle Richmond (1860), the next, concerns a rivalry between a widow and her daughter over Owen Fitzgerald, an Irish aristocrat who (innocently enough) goes off finally the son and brother. Set in Cork during the Famine, it illustrates that catastrophe with searing details, while assigning the cause to the ignorance and rapacity of the Irish middle class. Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1874), though the title-character is Irish and supposedly modelled on John Sadleir, focus on political life at Westminster.

An Eye for an Eye (1879), set at the Cliffs of Moher, is another tale of seduction, in which the mother of the injured girl revenges herself upon the young officer who, on becoming an earl, has jilted her. The Landleaguers (1883) was the last of nearly fifty novels. Written on a visit to Ireland when he was already very ill, and published uncompleted, it deals with the persecution of an English family who buy an estate in Co. Galway. As an independent and non-sectarian observer, Trollope showed considerable insight into the thoughts and feelings of the Catholic majority, particularly with regard to the influence for good of priests such as Fr. McGrath in The Macdermots and Fr. Marty in An Eye for an Eye.

Later, his conservatism reasserted itself under pressure of events surrounding the Land War of the 1870s and 1880s, and his final novel demonizes the Land League and immoderately disparages the clergy. Probably influenced by the Young Ireland Rising of 1848, he wrote a series of articles in The Times during 1849-50 supporting strict measures in Ireland and vindicating the policy of Lord John Russell. See among others John N. Hall (ed), Trollope (1992); and the full-length study by Victoria Glendenning, Trollope (1992). Welch (ed), Oxford Companion.