Study in Contradictions : ANTHONY TROLLOPE, <i> By Victoria Glendinning (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 50 photographs, 551 pp.)</i>

At first glance it might seem odd that Victoria Glendinning chose Anthony Trollope to be the subject of her first biography of a man. After writing about Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West and Rebecca West, Glendinning now offers us what is essentially a sympathetic portrait of the gentleman who wrote, in 1879, “ ‘The necessity of the supremacy of man (over woman) is as certain to me as the eternity of the soul.’ ”

Anyone acquainted with Trollope’s work, though, will not be unduly alarmed by this bombast. Trollope, after all, created some of the most memorable female characters in English literature, many of them challenging this theoretical male supremacy in novel after novel. If this suggests a certain split between Trollope’s beliefs and actual practice, it is only one of many contradictions that make this icon of the Victorian Age such a fascinating subject for a biography.

By no means uncritical of this patriarch, Glendinning nevertheless refrains from indulging in the prickly wit that Lytton Strachey used to deflate Trollope’s schoolfellow, Cardinal Manning, in his vastly entertaining, but perhaps not altogether fair, “Eminent Victorians” (1918). Though deploring the shocking sexism and racism of the times, Glendinning also finds something to admire about the age, not least of which is the prodigious industry of its authors. In addition to 47 novels and five volumes of short stories, Trollope managed to write several travel books on places as remote as South Africa and New Zealand, a version of Caesar’s Commentaries, lives of Thackeray, Cicero, and Lord Palmerston, as well as numerous sketches and articles--and a Carlyle-like diatribe on British institutions. What is even more astonishing is that the bulk of this work was accomplished while Trollope held down a full-time job in the Post Office. Indeed, Trollope insisted that “ ‘I had thought very much more about the Post Office than I had of my literary work.’ ”

Glendinning’s portrait is really something of a group portrait, with the women in Trollope’s life given due prominence. “The nature of marriage,” she writes in her introduction, “and the balance of power between the sexes, a central question in much of Trollope’s fiction, is central to this book too.” Yet the woman who stands out most vividly is not Rose, Trollope’s loyal, forbearing wife, but his mother. The story of how Mrs. Frances Trollope rescued her husband and children from certain destitution makes one wonder even more about the necessity of male superiority. “The mother was left to nurse three terminally ill people (her husband and two of her children) and to support the family by her nonstop writing.” This meant getting up at four in the morning to get the writing done before her household duties began.

Though Frances Trollope was truly heroic, starting her career at the age of 51 and going on to write 40 books, Glendinning’s portrait leaves out none of the warts. Robert Browning referred to her as “ ‘that coarse, vulgar Mrs. Trollope’ ” and told his wife “ ‘if you don’t want to give me the greatest pain . . . you won’t receive that vulgar pushing woman who is not fit to speak to you.’ ” Even Trollope himself shaded his own view of his mother when he wrote in his autobiography, “ ‘ . . . she was neither clear-sighted nor accurate; and in her attempts to describe morals, manners, and even facts, was unable to avoid the pitfalls of exaggeration.’ ”

Glendinning clearly charts how Trollope--or Anthony, as she refers to him throughout--arrived at this sober assessment of his mother when he was 60. Tom, his oldest brother, enjoyed an unusually close relationship to their mother, whose frank, outspoken manner made her more of a Georgian, as Glendinning points out, than a Victorian. When Mrs. Trollope asked Tom to look after his younger brother at Winchester, Tom complied by giving Anthony daily beatings. Later in life, while Anthony chafed and sulked as a bored young junior clerk in the Post Office, his mother rescued Tom from a tedious job in Birmingham, making him not only her business manager and agent, but also “ ‘her companion and squire.’ ” A year before Anthony nearly succumbed to a mysterious illness that was quite possibly related to his chronic depression, Mrs. Trollope and Tom were in Paris, “ ‘overwhelmed with invitations and social attentions of all sorts.’ ” She was even presented to King Louis Philippe.

Nowhere near as colorful a character as his mother, Rose Heseltine, whom Anthony married in 1844 when he was 29, became the mainstay of his life, giving him “the authentication and support he needed for building his self-esteem.” Here Glendinning, as Trollope’s first woman biographer, brings some marvelous insights into his work by unveiling Rose’s subtle, pervading influence behind the scenes. What at first seem trivial matters, such as Anthony’s fussy concern about the effect of railroad smoke and smut on women’s attire, are connected to the very feel, or essence, of his novels. Quoting from his first biographer, Glendinning helps us see that Anthony’s “ ‘close looking into the commonest objects of daily life always reminded her (a clever Dublin lady) of a woman in a shop examining the materials of a new dress.’ ”

Because of this finely textured, almost feminine realism in his work, people who met Anthony during his heyday in the mid-1860s were surprised by how coarse and robust he seemed in person. On one of his trips to the United States, Anthony was described by James Russell Lowell as “ ‘a big, red-faced, rather underbred Englishman. . . . A good roaring positive fellow who deafened me.’ ” Glendinning carefully delineates the boundaries between the outer and inner man, so that statements such as Lowell’s--and Henry James’ first impression of Anthony’s “ ‘gross and repulsive face and manner’ “--are balanced against the Proustian moi profond . This inner man, in his novels, “explored ambivalence and ambiguity, his honesty pushing against the sexual stereotyping which society imposed and which he, in his ‘outside’ life, depended on for his comfort and self-esteem.”

Any biographer of Trollope has a real challenge when it comes to describing this inner man, so often afflicted by depression and doubt despite the hearty, jovial facade. The autobiography is little help, being more of a “profit-and-loss account of his life and work.” Though some of his letters might be useful, most are “ ‘business’ letters, even when the recipients were his friends.’ ” Glendinning takes a cautious approach, gleaning from the novels where appropriate and advancing her own ideas about his dual nature with gentle surmises that never belabor the point.

In making honesty his prime virtue, Trollope believed that “both the sublime and the ludicrous were easier to achieve in fiction than the realistic, in that ‘they are not required to be true.’ ” Victoria Glendinning has paid her subject the ultimate compliment by applying this principle to biography as well. Resisting the temptation to squeeze Trollope into any convenient theoretical framework, she has given us a scrupulously fair portrait that greatly enriches our understanding of the creative imagination.

A more conventional portrait of Trollope emerges from Richard Mullen’s “Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World” (Frederic C. Beil: $45; 767 pp.). In his sensible, admirably limpid approach, Mullen makes a case for a more integrated writer, one whose theory and practice were not at odds. Where Glendinning refers to “Anthony,” Mullen’s “Trollope” suggests a gentlemanly distance from his subject, somewhat less familiar. Such a vantage point tends to highlight just how much Trollope was a product of his era. For instance, Mullen is not impressed by Trollope’s own account of how miserable his childhood was. Seen in this perspective--which makes Fanny Trollope more sympathetic, actually--” . . . Trollope’s childhood was not unique. . . . His wanderings among schools, while unhappy, were no worse than what many other boys endured.” Chock-full of vital information about the Victorians, this impressive biography is a splendid guide for all Trollopians, no matter how they choose to view their hero.