Joanna Trollope obituary
Novelist whose bestsellers on relationships and modern life were dubbed ‘Aga sagas’
Joanna Trollope, who has died aged 82, was one of those rare writers who can be said to have invented a genre. When popular fiction written by, and mainly for, women tended to be classified either as “romantic novels” or “historical sagas”, Joanna gained huge success, both commercially and critically, by writing intelligently, with warmth and humour, about real situations and dilemmas that had relevance to modern women of all ages and circumstances.
She began as an author of historical romances, but her writing career was transformed with the publication of the contemporary novel A Village Affair (1989), which became her first bestseller. A young wife moves to a quiet country village with her boring husband, where she becomes friends with an independent-minded woman who lives nearby. But this is no conventional rural tale – the two women fall deeply in love. Village life, in all its complexities of petty rivalries and prejudices, is examined with incisive understanding.
A Passionate Man appeared the following year, but it was The Rector’s Wife (1991) that assured Joanna’s literary stardom. The heroine, Anna Bouverie, the rector’s wife of the title, has devotedly fulfilled her role, married to a vicar who has become increasingly bitter about his lack of preferment and who gives her none of the affection she craves. She is fed up with being poor, her daughter is being bullied at the local school, and Anna wants some independence. To the scandal of the parish, she takes a job in the local supermarket, and also discovers that other men find her attractive. This novel gave Joanna her first No 1 bestseller, which replaced (to her great joy) a Jeffrey Archer in the top position.
The term “Aga saga” had by now been attached to Joanna’s novels, which caused her some irritation, and was based on the erroneous assumption that all her novels were set in the Cotswolds and were about well-to-do families whose comfortable rural existences naturally revolved around an Aga cooker. In fact she wrote about modern life in its many and varied forms, in town and country, with razor-sharp observation and an extraordinary insight into human relationships of every kind.
“In all of my novels an Aga only gets mentioned twice,” she said despairingly, “but they will insist on calling me the Queen of the Aga Saga!” Marriage, divorce, adultery, female friendship, children, second families, sibling rivalry, careers – all this, and much more, was the stuff of her writing.
Joanna was born at her grandfather’s rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, during the second world war; her father, Arthur Trollope, became the manager of a building society after wartime service, and her mother, Rosemary (nee Hodson), was an artist. Although not directly descended from Anthony (“the real Trollope”, as she called him), she was a fifth-generation niece of the Victorian novelist. Brought up in Reigate, Surrey, she was educated at Reigate county school for girls, from where she won a scholarship to study English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She liked to point out in interviews that, contrary to the public perception that she was terribly posh, she was state educated and proud of it.
After university she worked for a while in the mid-60s as a civil servant at the Foreign Office before becoming a teacher of English. At Oxford she had met David Potter while they were acting together in Murder in the Cathedral. They shared a love of poetry (her favourite poet was Andrew Marvell) and exchanged endless books; Joanna kept a detailed diary of their university life together. They married in 1966 and had two daughters, Louise and Antonia. The marriage ended in divorce in 1983.
Her first novel, Eliza Stanhope, was published in 1978. Her early historical romances enjoyed some success – Parson Harding’s Daughter (1979) won the Romantic Novelists’ Association novel of the year award – but it was not until she started writing contemporary novels that her career took off. The first of these was The Choir (1988), set in a cathedral city and with a suitably ecclesiastical background, chronicling a bitter feud at Aldminster Cathedral (loosely based on Gloucester Cathedral) developing between the dean, who is passionate about restoring the crumbling cathedral even if it means sacrificing the choir, and the headmaster, who is equally passionately determined to keep the choir. “A modern Barchester Chronicle,” said the Daily Telegraph.
A hugely popular 1994 television adaptation of The Rector’s Wife, starring Lindsay Duncan, further boosted her profile and sales. This was followed in 1995 by a TV dramatisation of A Village Affair and a BBC serialisation of The Choir, and later, in 2000, by a BBC serialisation of Other People’s Children, produced by Christopher Hall.Marrying the Mistress, published in 2000, was later dramatised for the stage.
Nineteen further contemporary novels followed The Rector’s Wife, including a powerful look at the lives of families in the army, The Soldier’s Wife (2012), as well as an anthology of rural writing, The Country Habit (1993), anda modern version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 2013. In 1983 Joanna wrote a highly regarded study of women in the British empire, Britannia’s Daughters. She also returned to the historical romance genre with occasional new titles to accompany the reissue of her earlier books (now published under the name Caroline Harvey). All in all she sold 3.1m books in the UK as well as enjoying popularity in many overseas markets.
Joanna marriedIan Curteis, a television dramatist, in 1985; it was he who gave her the idea of writing contemporary novels. She lived in Gloucestershire until their divorce in 2001. She then moved to Chelsea, where she greatly enjoyed London life with travel, music, art, theatre, cinema and ballet, as well as gaining huge enjoyment from her growing family. She was closely involved in many literary, cultural and charitable organisations, and judged prizes, including chairing the Orange prize for fiction in 2012. She was appointed OBE in 1996, advanced to CBE in 2019.
I knew Joanna as her longtime editor and, increasingly over the years, as a dear friend. Superbly elegant, funny and a wonderful conversationalist, she was loyal and steadfast, generous, a wonderful hostess and held strong convictions about most things – politics, feminism, and, of course, how her books should be published.
She is survived by Louise and Antonia, five grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.