Little lacerations on the human spirit: Trollope is no longer the preserve of bores and buffers of all ages, after-dinner pontificators, people who hate novels, genteel middle-aged rowdies, sufferers from terminal pomposity and tories.

HE HAS been having some rather good times lately, and this week looks set to be his best ever. Tomorrow, a memorial to Anthony Trollope will be unveiled in Westminster Abbey; the ceremony will include a reading from An Autobiography (1883) by the actor Jack May, best known as Nelson Gabriel from The Archers. To mark the day, Penguin Books will publish a paperback of The Macdermots of Ballycloren (1847), Trollope's literary debut, and seven other early novels. Further batches will be issued over the next few months, so that by November the Penguin Trollope will contain all 47 of his novels, the aforementioned Autobiography and the short stories.

The British Library is also playing its part in this week's festivities, with its exhibition 'A Habit of Industry: Anthony Trollope 1815- 1822': manuscripts, drawings, photographs and the like. And all these acts of homage are simply riding the crest of a new wave of interest in the novelist that has included four weighty biographies - notably Victoria Glendinning's, which won the Whitbread Award last November; the founding of the Trollope Society, which has been lobbying for the Poet's Corner tribute, in 1987; and, not least, John Major's declaration that the book with which he would most like to while away the hours on his BBC-sponsored Desert Island was The Small House at Allington.

In short, while Trollope might not be quite so ubiquitous these days as that astute cultural commentator Wallace Arnold so agreeably suggested - his list of recommended Christmas reading for the Independent on Sunday included Kenneth Baker's collection of Great Trollope Anecdotes, Emily Secombe's Trollope's Hamster and Trollope's Provence, by Peter Mayle - he is certainly enjoying a degree of posthumous success to make most writers livid with envy.

One group of writers, however, are not merely happy but delighted at the progress of the great Trollope revival. True, some of them will confess to having come to his works with a measure of reluctance. Trollope continues to bear the stigma of being the novelist for people who hate novels - bores and buffers of all ages, after-dinner pontificators, genteel middle-aged rowdies (the pose, if such it was, that Trollope himself adopted after his wretched, melancholic youth) and sufferers from terminal pomposity.

Victoria Glendinning summed up this phenomenon in saying that Trollope had been 'hijacked' by the middle-aged male establishment, particularly its Tory wing. The heist has left an overpowering smell of fustiness. P D James recalls that 'I came very late to Trollope. During my adolescence I would compare him very unfavourably to Jane Austen, and thought him terribly dull and worthy, not at all one of the top-rate Victorian novelists.'

Trollope's reputation has not precisely suffered from neglect: as John Letts, the founder and presiding spirit of the Trollope Society, points out, academic critics may have ignored Trollope until the 1970s or thereabouts, but the reading public has always kept him healthily in print. Rather, he has suffered from the wrong kind of admiration.

Yet Trollope is and always has been a writer's writer, too. His admirers have included Tolstoy, Henry James, Browning and George Eliot, who said that his talent for assembling seemingly unremarkable incidents into an absorbing plot was 'among the subtleties of art which can hardly be appreciated except by those who have striven after the same result with conscious failure'.

Today, the list of professional writers who admire him enough to have joined the Trollope Society includes the converted Baroness James - 'Trollope is wonderful, a major novelist, a joy' - Lady Antonia Fraser, Jonathan Raban and Ruth Rendell from this side of the Atlantic, and Gore Vidal and Louis Auchincloss from the United States, where Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities has been lauded for its Trollopean social reach and where Dominick Dunne modelled his best-seller People Like Us after The Way We Live Now (1875).

What precisely do such present-day literati see in Trollope? Much the same as any other enthusiastic reader, it appears, albeit with a keener awareness, like George Eliot's, of the hard writing it takes to produce easy reading. 'I particularly admire his empathy with his characters, and the way in which he describes women,' P D James says. 'He's unique among male novelists, better even than Henry James, in his ability to enter the lives of women characters, and women on their own. I think of scenes such as Lady Glencora Palliser in her boudoir in Can You Forgive Her?, talking to Alice Vavasor - it's a scene of two women talking intimately together, and it's absolutely remarkable that a man could have written this.'

Other writers emphasise Trollope's dramatic powers, especially in the scrutiny he brings to ethical questions. The novelist Amanda Craig believes that this aspect of his novels is the one that modren writers could most profitably emulate.

'I began reading him in the mid-1980s, with The Way We Live Now, and I was startled by it. I recognised everything Trollope was writing about in the world around me, in that terrible Thatcherite decision we were all having to make between ambition and personal happiness - it's the general Trollopean dilemma, really, of having to chose between marrying someone rich and well-connected and someone you really love. I'd started writing novels myself at about this time and was dismayed at how few of my contemporaries were addressing these themes.' Her own novel-in-progress, A Vicious Circle, is (in the manner of Dominick Dunne) 'a sort of reworking of The Way We Live Now'.

Such direct lines of influence are rare. Unlike most other major novelists, Trollope is quite uninfluential, except for the example he sets as a classical pillar in the main house of traditional fiction. Amanda Craig believes his style has one or two fans - 'he's pithy and pungent, almost like Jane Austen' - but has inspired few imitators.

Even his descendant Joanna Trollope, the only other member of the family to have turned to fiction, concedes that 'Trollope's style has few treats; it's inclined to verbosity and facetiousness, and the sentences can be quite unwieldy - he's a great man for the dependent clause. He didn't try to invent a language, as Dickens did, and he doesn't have Thackeray's graceful gift. But he wasn't incapable of eloquence - he once said that his subject was 'the little daily lacerations on the human spirit', which is a fine phrase - and he used language well for his particular purpose.'

The purpose in question was the accurate rendition of the routine worlds of politics, law, money, the Church and the well-appointed household, rather than the grand, poetic or grotesque subjects that have preoccupied other novelists.

It may be that politicians enjoy Trollope because they find his attentions flattering; but this is not to say that his novels hold small appeal for those whose dreams do not run to a safe majority. Or, as Joanna Trollope puts it: 'He's not a philosophical novelist, or a questioning one, he's an examining novelist. Walter Scott once said something to the effect that the best fiction is a record of the day-to-day doings of humankind. That is the kind of fiction which Trollope wrote, and he wrote it supremely well.'

'A Habit of Industry' continues at the British Library until 27 June

(Photograph omitted)