Following the success of the Trollope Society’s 2026 conference, Trollope: The Law & Transgression, held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, we are delighted to present a series of online Zoom talks featuring conference speakers exploring law, morality, justice, gender, religion, inheritance, equity, and social transgression in the novels of Anthony Trollope.

Law, Transgression, and Gender Prejudice in Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry

Professor Deborah Denenholz Morse

Anthony Trollope’s short novel Cousin Henry centres on a transgression of the spirit rather than the strict letter of the law. From the outset, the offence is clear: Henry knows where his uncle Indefer has hidden a later will that would disinherit the rightful heir, but he conceals this knowledge. Trollope’s interest lies less in legal procedure than in Henry’s inner life and in the responses of those around him, from the morally upright Isabel Brodrick to the resolute family solicitor, Mr Apjohn.

The novel’s deeper mystery, however, lies in the visceral revulsion Henry inspires. Nearly everyone who encounters him expresses intense loathing, often in strikingly hyperbolic terms. This language is accompanied by repeated suggestions that Henry is deficient in conventional manliness, accused of weakness, emotional excess, and an inability to “face it like a man”.

Trollope appears to interrogate the prejudice generated by Henry’s presentation of gender difference. The extremity of Henry’s own perceptions gradually shifts the reader’s sympathy towards him. Although legally and socially absolved in the end, Henry remains marked by the ordeal. This paper argues that Cousin Henry offers not only a critique of primogeniture, but a broader and more searching examination of gender prejudice.

Deborah Denenholz Morse is the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Professor at William & Mary. Deborah is the author of Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels, Reforming Trollope, and wide-ranging articles on Trollope. She is lead editor of The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, and co-editor of The Politics of Gender in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. She also writes and edits frequently on the Brontës, on Elizabeth Gaskell, and in Animal Studies.

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10 September 2026 at 8pm, Professor Deborah Denenholz Morse – Law, Transgression, and Gender Prejudice in Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry

8 October 2026 at 8pm, Professor Gary Watt – Trollope and the Equitable Judgment of Human Failings

14 January 2027 at 8pm, Gilly Wilford – Unexpected Interventions: The Deus ex Machina in Court

11 March 2027 at 8pm, Dr Tom Crewe – How Bad is John Caldigate?

8 April 2027 at 8pm, Dr Frederik Van Dam – ‘Some gross insufficiency in the laws of extradition’: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux

13 May 2027 at 8pm, Professor Linda McClain and Claire Laporte – A Taxonomy of Transgression in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: A Conversation
(The previously advertised date for this meeting was 12 November 2026.)

Click here to register on Zoom to attend Trollope: The Law & Transgression Conference Series

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