![]() Even so, he was very successful in his day - so successful that he began to suffer from that paranoia which can afflict popular authors: Do the public buy my novels because I'm a great writer or because my name is famous? To test the water he published a couple of novels anonymously, Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, with stories as far removed from Barsetshire as possible. Trollope himself acknowledged that he occasionally kept one in a drawer for months in order not to flood the market too often. In Trollope's case, as Quicksilver says, critics were appalled by his business-like attitude to writing and the fact that his novels sometimes appeared at the alarming rate of more than one a year. ![]() I would agree that there is a certain snobbish or at least ambivalent attitude in academic circles to popular authors, but surely Dickens is the great exemplar of a truly popular author with a broad general audience and one who has hardly been neglected by academe. >15 Django6924: "Trollope was very popular with a broad general audience, and academe tends to have a snobbish attitude about such things." Flaubert took a similar approach and was never denigrated in this way. This led to many critics denigrating his work, believing that genius could never work to a schedule. Trollope's greatest mistake was confessing in his autobiography that he had very workmanlike writing habits, writing a certain number of pages every day. Also, OUP championed Trollope, keeping all of his ouvre in print, when many other publishers neglected him. I love the pocket size, thin paper and clear type of these volumes. Trollope was published in the UK in this format up to the mid 70's. I have been collecting Trollope in the old hardback pocket classics issued by Oxford University Press in the World's Classics series. The Way We Live Now in particular is a towering achievment, comparable to Bleak House in my view. They have very different styles - Dickens emphasising the grotesque while Trollope was more of a realist when it came to understanding how money, power and birth interacted. I love Trollope but Dickens is still my favourite.
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