Frances Trollope was the mother of Anthony Trollope, she had several children, two of whom became writers, and she is thought to have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing, as Frances wrote about slavery before Stowe did.

In The Widow Barnaby, Agnes Willoughby is just 17 years old and is alone in the world, apart from a couple of aunts, and she has only met one of them, Aunt Barnaby. So Agnes is completely dependent on her aunt for everything, unfortunately Aunt Barnaby is such a common, vulgar female that she is a big disadvantage when it comes to Agnes’s personal life, for she has fallen in love with Colonel Hubert, a man over twice her age but Agnes realises that when he and his family meet Aunt Barnaby they will be so appalled by her flirting, mode of dress and general ‘common as muck’ behaviour that Agnes will be dropped quickly.

The situation gets worse when Aunt Barnaby is hauled off to London’s infamous Fleet prison for non-payment of her debts, leaving Agnes with no alternative but to write a begging letter to the aunt that she has never met, something which Aunt Barnaby has always warned her against as the two were not on speaking terms.

This is a quick read, compared with Anthony’s massive tomes anyway and if you enjoy Victorian literature you might want to give it a go.

I enjoyed this one which I got from Project Gutenberg, here.

The character of Aunt Barnaby is very similar to that of Aunt Morrow who appears in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? It would seem that Anthony definitely read his mother’s books, maybe they were both using an acquaintance of theirs as copy, or perhaps cheap widows who were determined to track down their next well off husband were a staple of that society.