Women’s Spheres of Action

Trollope described Arabella Trefoil as an “odious female,” whose husband hunting he intended to satirize in The American Senator, and yet, sympathy for Arabella’s desperate, hard work at that “vocation” seeps into the novel. Along with Arabella, Trollope presents an intriguing portrait gallery of female characters and their family, economic, and social relationships.

Linda McClain is the Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University. She writes and teaches in the areas of family law and gender and law and is the author of several books, most recently Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her first introduction to Trollope was The Warden. She recently published an article about “the woman question” in the Palliser novels and is hoping to begin a book-length project on Trollope’s novels.