Frances Trollope, 1780-1863, was a British travel writer and novelist best known for Domestic Manners of the Americans, though she also wrote well-received anti-slavery and industrial novels. The first of her books was published when she was 52 years old, and she would go on to write over 40 books, supporting her family from the income.

Henry Trollope, 1811-1834, was her son. He died at the age of 23, from tuberculosis.

Frances, or Fanny, was born in Bristol. At the age of 30 she married Thomas Anthony Trollope, 1774-1835, and together they had seven children, six of whom survived, including the novelist Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882. Her husband failed as a lawyer and then as a farmer, and the family faced increasing financial troubles. In 1827, Trollope, along with her son Henry and her two daughters, escaped to America to join reformer and abolitionist Frances Wright at the Tennessee utopian community Nashoba, which was dedicated to educating and emancipating slaves. After the project failed, Trollope moved to Cincinnati, where she attempted various unsuccessful business ventures, including a bazaar. In 1830 she returned to England, but her observations from her time in Cincinnati would form the bulk of Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)—a controversial and enormously successful work which criticized the rude manners of Americans and critiqued the subjugation of women and enslaved people in a nation that supposedly valued democracy and equality. The book was published the same year as the Reform Act 1832, and Trollope's criticisms of American democracy were seized upon by Conservative anti-reformers.

The popularity of Domestic Manners jumpstarted Trollope's writing career. In total, she would write six travel books and thirty-five novels over a period of twenty-five years. Notable among these works is The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or, Scenes on the Mississippi (1836), an anti-slavery novel that preceded Uncle Tom's Cabin by fifteen years. The most successful of her novels is The Widow Barnaby (1839) and its sequels, The Widow Married (1839-1840) and The Barnabys in America (1842-1843).

Donald Arthur Smalley, 1907- , was a professor and the author of Trollope: The Critical Heritage, about Anthony Trollope.