When the name Trollope is mentioned today, it is generally understood to refer to the Victorian novelist Anthony (or, occasionally, to his contemporary descendant, Joanna). Even though her books (35 novels and six travel books) are now virtually unread, Anthony's mother, Fanny (1779-1863), was a successful writer well before her son was ever published. By Neville-Sington's account, Fanny Milton, the daughter of a Hampshire rector, would have been an ideal Austen heroine: she read copiously and deeply, in several languages, and learned how to make her own way within society. Moving to London in her early 20s, she married Thomas Anthony Trollope, a lawyer by whom she had six children. But in 1827, the death of one son, her husband's financial bungling and his increasing severity led her to take the then extraordinary step of leaving her husband (and young Anthony) for America. Although she failed to find her fortune there, when she returned at age 53, she launched her writing career with her scathing observations of American life, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and a darkly comic first novel, The Refugee in America (1832). From then on, she was amazingly prolific; if her books were not critically acclaimed, they were popular and profitable. Ironically, of all her children, it was Anthony with whom Fanny spent the least time. and the eclipse of her literary reputation owed much to her son's repudiation in his autobiography.