producing six living children, the Trollopes' marriage was reputedly unhappy. Move to America Soon after the move to the leased farm, her marital and financial strains led Frances to seek companionship and aid from Fanny Wright, ward of the French hero Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. In 1824 she visited La Grange, Lafayette's estate in France. Over the next three years, she made several other visits to France and was inspired to take an American excursion with Wright. Frances thought of America as a simple economic venture and figured that she could save money by sending her children through Wright's communal school, as Wright had planned to reform the education of African American children and the formerly enslaved on their property in Tennessee. In 1827, Frances Trollope took most of her family to Fanny Wright's utopian community Nashoba Commune in the United States. Her husband and remaining family followed shortly after. Arriving in the United States four years earlier than her husband, she developed an intimate relationship with Auguste Hervieu, a collaborator in her venture. After the community failed, Trollope moved to Cincinnati, Ohio with her sons. She also encouraged the sculptor Hiram Powers to do Dante Alighieri's Commedia in waxworks. Nonetheless, all the ways she tried to support herself in America were unsuccessful. She found the cultural climate uninteresting and came to resent democracy. Furthermore, after her venture failed, her family was more in debt than when she had migrated there and they were forced to move back to England in 1831. Return to Europe From her return at the age of 50 until her death, Trollope's need of an income for her family and to escape her debts led her to begin writing novels, memoirs of her travels, and other shorter pieces, while travelling around Europe. She became well acquainted with elites and figures of Victorian literature including Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Joseph Henry Green and R. W. Thackeray (a relative of William Makepeace Thackeray). She wrote 40 books: six travelogues, 35 novels, countless controversial articles, and poems. In 1843, Frances visited Italy and eventually moved to Florence permanently. Writing career Trollope already gained notice with her first book Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). She gave an unfavourable, and in the opinions of America's partisans, an exaggerated account. Her novel, The Refugee in America (1832), expressed similar views, prompting Catharine Sedgwick to respond that