Joanna Trollope | |
|---|---|
 Trollope in 2011 | |
| Born | (1943-12-09)9 December 1943 Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, England |
| Died | 11 December 2025(2025-12-11) (aged 82) Oxfordshire, England |
| Pen name | Caroline Harvey |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | English |
| Period | 1978–2025 |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 4 |
| Relatives | Anthony Trollope |
Joanna Trollope (/ˈtrɒləp/TROL-əp; 9 December 1943 – 11 December 2025) was an English writer. She also wrote under the pseudonym ofCaroline Harvey. Her novelParson Harding's Daughter won the 1980Romantic Novel of the Year Award by theRomantic Novelists' Association.[1]
Joanna Trollope was born on 9 December 1943 at her grandfather's[2] rectory inMinchinhampton, Gloucestershire, England, the daughter of Rosemary Hodson and Arthur George Cecil Trollope.[3][4] Her father was head of a smallbuilding society and anOxford University classics graduate. Her mother was an artist and writer.[5] Her father was away forSecond World War service in India when she was born; he returned when she was three years old. The family settled inReigate, Surrey. Trollope had a younger brother and sister. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls,[6] gaining a scholarship toSt Hugh's College, Oxford, in 1961. She read English.[7]
Victorian novelistAnthony Trollope was her fifth-generation uncle,[8] and she was a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope. Of inheriting the name, she remarked:
Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference ... I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.[9]
From 1965 to 1967, she worked at theForeign and Commonwealth Office. While a civil servant,[2] she researched Eastern Europe and the relations between China and the developing world.[10] From 1967 to 1979, she was employed in a number of teaching posts before she became a writer full-time in 1980.
Trollope began writing historical romances under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey, the first names of her father's parents. She formed the view that: "It was the wrong genre for the time."[5] Encouraged by her second husband,Ian Curteis, she switched to the contemporary fiction for which she became known.[11]The Choir, published in 1987, was her first contemporary novel.[8]The Rector's Wife, published in 1991, displacedJeffrey Archer from the top of the hardback bestseller lists. As an explanation, she said in 2006: "except for thrillers there was nothing in the middle ground of the traditional novel, which is where I think I am."[5] In 1992, onlyJilly Cooper'sPolo and Archer'sAs the Crow Flies were stronger paperback bestsellers. "I think my books are just the dear old traditional novel making a quiet comeback", she toldGeraldine Bedell in a 1993 interview forThe Independent on Sunday.[6]
Often described asAga sagas, for their rural themes, only two of Trollope's novels (by 2006) actually feature anAga.[5] The term's entry inThe Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009) states that "by no means all her work fits the generally comforting implications of the label".[12] Rejecting the label as not being accurate, Trollope told Lisa Allardice, writing forThe Guardian in 2006: "Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak. It's all rather patronising isn't it?"[5] Allardice disputed the "cosy reputation" Trollope's books had acquired as her novels had "tackled increasingly thorny issues including lesbianism, broken families and adoption, the mood growing darker with each novel."[5]Terence Blacker, who coined the term for Trollope's fiction inPublishing News in 1992,[12] admitted a decade later that he "felt terribly guilty" for lumbering Trollope with the phrase.[13][14] Trollope told Bedell in 1993 that her fiction does "the things the traditional novel has always done" by mirroring reality and exploring "people's emotional lives". Bedell observed that her novels until then were:
never suburban, which is the real condition of most of England. Trollopian action takes place in large village houses, at vast kitchen tables; her doctors, vicars, solicitors and craft-gallery owners may worry about money, as her own parents did, but they don't have any social anxieties: they are invited for drinks at the big house as a matter of course. The books are as economically prestigious, and quite as aspirational in their own way, as the glitter blockbusters of the Eighties.[6]
In 2009, she donated the short storyThe Piano Man to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Trollope's story was published in the 'Water' collection.[15] She wrote the first novel in Harper Collins updating of theJane Austen canon,The Austen Project. Her version ofSense and Sensibility was published in October 2013 with limited success.
An adaptation ofThe Rector's Wife (1994), produced forChannel 4, starredLindsay Duncan andRonald Pickup.[16]The Choir, adapted by Ian Curteis, was a five-episodeBBC televisionminiseries in 1995. It starredJane Asher andJames Fox.[17] Of her other novels,A Village Affair andOther People's Children were also adapted for television.[8]
A Spanish Lover: InThe New York Times Betsy Groban wrote, ″Her story is filled with lively, astute and always affectionate insights into the abiding issues of marriage, motherhood and materialism, not to mention the destructive power of envy and the importance of living one's own life. ″[18]
Marrying the Mistress: ″With its sharp eye, light tone and sly, witty pace, Joanna Trollope's ninth novel delivers all the ingredients of romantic comedy, yet ends with a subtle, dark twist.″[19]
Friday Nights: Heather Thompson ofThe Guardian calledFriday Nights "a light but insightful look at a rather conventional cast of characters."[20]
Charlie Lee-Potter, in an article forThe Independent, wrote thatBrother & Sister:
wades through the anguish of adoption, scooping up the pain of the adopted child, the agony of the birth mother and the insecurity of the adoptive parent along the way. If I was any one of the characters imprisoned in the murky jelly of this novel, I'd be straight on to the Adoption Agency, demanding to be re-settled with another creator. Joanna Trollope has a subject capable of making us weep at the tragedy and the loss, and yet what does she achieve? She so resolutely makes her characters emote to each other in a ghastly brand of unisex mush that I actually found myself blushing.[21]
On 14 May 1966,[4] Trollope married a city banker, David Roger William Potter. The couple had two daughters, Louise and Antonia, but divorced in 1983.[3][11] In 1985, Trollope married the television dramatistIan Curteis and became stepmother to his two sons; she and Curteis divorced in 2001. After her second divorce, Trollope moved to West London.[7] She was a grandmother[5] and owned aLabrador retriever.[2]
Trollope appeared on a 1994 edition of the radio programmeDesert Island Discs. She remarked that men often suggested her books were trivial, to which she liked to respond: "It is a grave mistake to think there is more significance in great things than in little things", paraphrasingVirginia Woolf.[22][23][24][25]
At age 82, Trollope died at her home inOxfordshire on 11 December 2025.[26]
Source:[27]
Source:[51]
on the profusion of book awards and why most popular may be best
Interviews
