Margaret Markwick has previously published a study entitled Trollope and Women (1997). Her new book is positioned at the intersection of literary criticism and what since the mid-1970s has come to be known as women's studies. Markwick’s, however, is a particular strain of women's studies, that is, that which has focused on the reform of gender relations both as it pertains to women's roles within the public economy and to relations between men, women, and children in the domestic economy. From this perspective, Luke Rowan, the male protagonist of Anthony Trollope's 1863 novel Rachel Ray functions for Markwick as a model of the Victorian New Man as portrayed within Trollope's fiction. Rowan combines proper masculine values within the public sphere, which in this case means political liberalism (“It is in this point that he is a radical; that he desires, expects, works for, and believes in, the gradual progress of the people”; 80), plus probity in business (he intends to go into “trade” [80] and brew good beer). Rowan combines these values with qualities that a young woman might find desirable in a middle-class husband, namely, the fact that he is able to combine “manliness” (80) with the acknowledgment of “his tender side” (82).

Women's studies, however, has not been exclusively middle-class or heterosexual in its outlook. Had Markwick aligned herself with the feminist separatist tendencies that shaped a good deal of second-wave feminist work in the 1970s, she might have found of interest other domestic relations within Trollope such as same-sex friendship or even what Sharon Marcus refers to as female marriage. While I do not always agree with how Marcus deploys these terms in her recent study Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ, 2007), anyone who reads her tour de force analysis of Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65) will be aware that heterosexual monogamy provides too narrow and partial a frame within which to construe Trollope's sense of the extension and complication of intimate domestic relations. The same is likely to be the case for anyone who has read my discussion of the studiedly unknowing view of the place of sex and desire between males that Trollope takes in his 1883 Autobiography (“Stupid Trollope,” Victorian Newsletter 100 [Fall 2001]: 22–26) or his exploration of the erotic force of same-sex friendship within male elites, including at the highest circles of government (Friendship's Bonds, 2004, chap. 6).

A third important area within the dissident politics of sex and gender of the 1970s has to do with gay liberation theory, which in its radical phase contested the notion that personal identity is or should be grounded in gender. This challenge, which also occurs in the work of Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from the late 1970s onward, poses significant methodological challenges for institutional formations of women's studies since all three writers argue effectively the inadequacy of grounding feminist critique in conventional understandings of gender. While this view may appear to have no point of contact with Trollope, the writer of railway-station novels, no nineteenth-century writer of fiction demonstrates better than he does the socioeconomic and anthropological bases of gendered behaviors.

Trollope approaches questions of ethics in vernacular terms of value whose material grounds in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and race are never mystified. Hence terms such as manly and manliness appear in many voices expressive of varying perspectives. Trollope's perspectivism excludes the possibility of depth analysis of moral issues in his work. The continually shifting surfaces of his work, moreover, make it difficult to pin particular views or sentiments, many of which a later reader is likely to find outrageous, on Trollope himself. Nonetheless, Trollope does not altogether dissociate himself from the blindnesses and injustices of his characters. Trollope avoids positioning himself or his narrators as occupying morally privileged positions. Accordingly, Markwick errs when she comments early on that, despite the masculinist thoughts and attitudes recorded in the novels, their surfaces “peel away to reveal layers where men are in touch with their feelings, comfortable and effective in the domestic sphere” (62). The implicit outside-inside metaphor used here is incorrect. Trollope's realism, if one wishes to call it that, always deals in and at the level of social currency, including when judgments are based in sensibility or affect. The particular perspectivism that one finds in Trollope's texts tends to disarm literary criticism. It is in this area that Markwick's book will be of greatest value to students, especially undergraduates, and instructors; for her discussion and analysis of the multiple narrative voices that comprise these texts. Markwick expands on Ruth apRoberts's suggestion in Trollope: Artist and Moralist (1971) that Wayne Booth's theory of narratology provides means of parsing the subjective recirculation of key terms of psychological and moral value in the fiction (8–9, 65–70).

That said, the question remains: while one can admire Trollope's relentless reportage of the social fields under his observation, is the support for the mid-Victorian complementary marriage model that one finds in his fiction (a model that demands the existence of feminized husbands) particularly noteworthy? For example, the passage about emotionally mature men cited above is expressly ideological; and the ideology expressed is not only that of one variety of second-wave feminism and the subfield of masculinity studies that developed in dialogue with its prescriptions. The ideology is also familiar, indeed very familiar, within mid-Victorian literary culture itself, a classic instance occurring in Coventry Patmore's widely read poem The Angel in the House (1854). Or consider The Princess (1847–51), Alfred Tennyson's major treatment of issues relevant to contemporary bourgeois marriage. In that poem, he makes an influential statement of the ideal of marriage as an androgynous union between a man and a woman:

Yet in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;

She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,

Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind. (Canto 7: lines 263–68)

Trollope probably could have done without the childlike mind; nonetheless, Tennyson's ideal male spouse is comparable with the new Victorian man as Markwick describes it in Trollope's fiction. Is the point, then, that the complementary ideal had reached commuters too? Or is there another point to be made here as well?

As I’ve mentioned, any reading of Trollope that places in students’ hands means for conducting actual rhetorical analysis of the bland, undistinguished surfaces of his texts is much to be desired. Within the limits of Markwick's particular ideological perspective and bringing to bear contextual materials that she provides such as the debate over masculine values in Anglican High Church/Low Church debates, likely to be familiar to readers of this journal, New Men in Trollope's Novels makes a useful contribution to the study of his novels.