Frances Eleanor Trollope (1835–1913)

Frances Eleanor Trollope, née Ternan, was born aboard a paddle steamer in Delaware Bay, between Delaware and New Jersey, USA. Her parents Thomas Lawless Ternan and Frances Eleanor Ternan were actors on tour in North America. Frances Eleanor and her two sisters were put on the stage at a young age. Her youngest sister Ellen Ternan is best known as the longtime mistress of Charles Dickens. In the 1860s, Frances Eleanor interrupted her study of opera to take work as a governess in the home of Thomas Adolphus Trollope in Florence, Italy. He was 25 years her senior and a widower. The couple married in 1866, and Frances Eleanor also began writing fiction. Dickens published two of her early works, the novels Aunt Margaret’s Trouble (1866) and Mabel’s Progress (1867), as serials in his magazine All the Year Round. She collaborated on historical works with her husband and translated plays and travel books from Italian and German. She also published a dozen more novels of her own, several of which took as their subject young women trying to live independently in Victorian society. She also wrote a biography of her famous mother-in-law, Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria (1895). After being widowed in 1892, she returned to the UK, and lived with her sister Ellen at Southsea near Portsmouth.