WRITING AS A BUSINESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 12

WRITING AS A BUSINESS

‘XN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Anthony Trollope; the Oxford Trollope. Geoffrey. Cumberlege: Oxford University Press. English price, 15/-. HIS famous book is the key to. Trollope the man and the writer. More, it is a useful weapon in defence of writing as a business, as opposed to the idea of art for art’s sake. No novelist, one imagines, ever wrote about his craft more candidly and naively than Trollope does here. He tells us why, how, when and where he wrote, with details of the daily programme. He sets out the exact sum-~-received from each of his many books. He discusses his characters as if he were writing about members of his family to "a most intimate friend; somé he regards as failures, others as successes. His readers are even told why he killed Mrs. Proudie-because of some criticism he overhead in a club! Trollope’s methods of composition are @ classic illustration of the truth in the saying that success comes, not from inspiration, but from perspiratfon. During an official visit to Egypt, he finished a novel one day and began another the next. The English public, however, was shocked by this apparent reduction of an awesome mystery to the level of the counting-house, and ‘Trollope’s reputation suffered until the First World War started another wave of popularity, which is still mounting. The book is also a record of his other lives: his miserable boyhood, unhappy ee

early manhood, success as a Post Office official, and devotion to hunting, This edition, like the others in the series, is a production of scholars, For the first time the text is made to agree with Trollope’s manuscript, necessitating hundreds of corrections, and cancelled passages are printed. There is a chronology of his writings. The admirable illustrations include a specimen of his script, pictures from or relating to his novels, and postal documents. Altogether this is a highly satisfying reprint of the essential companion to the novels.

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