Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. ISBN: 9780521713955. Price: US$31.99/£19.99

As the 200th anniversary of Anthony Trollope’s birth approaches, other significant numbers loom: 47 novels and dozens of other texts—among them An Autobiography (1883) and biographies, travel books, and short stories—produced over three and a half decades, at a rate of roughly 250 words every fifteen minutes, 2,500 words each morning by 8:30 a.m. Such prodigious energy has always won Trollope respect as an emblem of Victorian industry, but has not benefitted his reputation as a major writer. It is the immense accomplishment of The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, edited by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, that it helps dispel a view that Trollope was too driven, too rushed to ever be much of a thinker. Of course, a number of scholars, in the last four decades (most recently in Regenia Gagnier, Margaret Markwick, and Deborah Denenholz Morse’s The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels, published in 2009 by Ashgate) —some of them represented by new work in this volume—have been making such a case. But the combination of so many different voices here, in essays of consistently high quality, makes this book an important contribution to Trollope scholarship. As the editors say in their introduction, Trollope “is an artist of the dialectic. His writing stages encounters between the polarities of the day. It drives toward a synthetic vision that holds opposing terms continuously in frame” (2). By venturing widely through his work, often to obscure corners, the sixteen essays in this volume reveal a Trollope admirably difficult to pin down, whose fertile mind is on display in almost everything he wrote. Niles makes a strong argument in a chapter on Trollope’s short fiction that the stories “offer almost limitless possibility in their creativity” (83). Indeed, one of the pleasant surprises of the Companion is how often other writers discuss these texts as well. Kate Flint, for instance, ends her provocative account of “Queer Trollope” with an exploration of several stories and shows how the genre itself “was especially amenable to the presentation of queer relationships” (110). On the other hand, the four pieces on Trollope’s extensive travels—by James Buzard, Nicholas Birns, Gordon Bigelow, and Amanda Claybaugh—make it clear that he was not attempting anything too original, or exciting, in the travel books that emerged from these journeys. But these essays also explore the many important short stories and novels that emerged from Trollope’s trips; we see too how the travels offer rich territory for ongoing debates about his politics. Buzard, for instance, claims that “nowhere in Trollope’s travel writings do we come across a substantial alteration of perspective; very nearly nowhere does prejudice falter; repeatedly we encounter expressions of bigotry and narrow-mindedness wholly conventional in Trollope’s culture” (171). By contrast, Birns argues that his trip to Australia and New Zealand in his mid-fifties “not only gave him perspective on England but, more crucially, extended his idea of what a social body could be” (184). And Mark W. Turner, in a chapter on Trollope’s life and times, talks about the author’s keen awareness of the global marketplace and how “Trollope—so often thought of in connection with the genteel landscape of rural England or the social politics of the drawing room—also embraced modernity and explored and wrote about the changing world open to him….In short, Trollope made the most of his travels” (12-13). The inclusion of such well-argued disparate views in addressing what the editors call the “bimodality” of Trollope’s work is one of the volume’s strengths (2). Needless to say, with 47 novels to choose from and so much space going to other works (including a fine …