That Trollope didn't know any women

Trollope’s portrayals of women aren't very convincing. This is true, it seems to me, of all portrayals of women by all Victorian male writers. Such were the times: like in India today, men and women lived gender-segregated lives. The result of gender segregation is incomprehension and mythmaking by the members of one sex about the members of the other.

This explains Trollope. (And Conrad – a sailor!)

I have noticed before that even today, in our coeducational society, children raised without siblings of similar age and opposite sex tend to have a much harder time understanding the opposite sex in their adulthood (and fewer but far more stormy and complicated romantic relationships). Boys raised like me, on close and intimate terms with several women (both siblings and aunts) tend to get along easier with women, perhaps in part because they have a more pedestrian and practical view of the sex. We are less likely to say silly things of the sort my painting teacher likes to say "the watercolor technique is like women -- it is thoroughly incomprehensible".