In this affectionate biography, the author provides a woman's view of Anthony Trollope. She brings a fresh emphasis on family, particularly on Trollope's relationship with his formidable mother, with his failure of a father, with his bullying older brother (mother's favourite), and with his tubercular sisters. But it is Anthony as husband and lover that intrigues her most; she investigates with sensitivy the nature of his love for the liberated young American Kate Field, and, most important, she discovers Rose, regarded in past biographies as a shadowy figure of a wife but viewed here as central to his life.