Joanna Trollope: novelist who had a No. 1 bestseller with The Rector’s Wife

“Joanna Trollope, who has died aged 82, was one of those rare writers who can be said to have invented a genre,” said The Guardian. In the late 20th century, popular fiction written by, and mainly for, women “tended to be classified as either ‘romantic novels’ or ‘historical sagas’”. By contrast, Trollope wrote, with warmth and intelligence, about the situations and dilemmas faced by real women in their everyday lives.

The book that made her name was “The Rector’s Wife” (1991), about an attractive middle- aged woman who moves to a rural village with her increasingly embittered clergyman husband, decides that she has had enough of acting as his unpaid assistant, and takes a job in a supermarket. It knocked Jeffrey Archer off the top spot and was followed by a slew of other bestsellers.

‘Good clear stuff’

Over 30 years, 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”; yet she came to be known as the “queen of the Aga saga”. She found the label “patronising”, lazy and ignorant, said The Times. To her dismay, it stuck, but success was her best revenge: her books were translated into more than 25 languages and sold some seven million copies.

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Writing in long hand, she worked from copious research notes that she called her “gerbil’s nest”. She had no pretension to be a great stylist. She described her writing as “good clear stuff”; but she believed that literature had a serious purpose. “I really believe,” she said, that “we learn more about the human condition from fiction than we do from anything else – except from life itself. I think novels help people survive, I really do.”

Supposed triviality

Joanna Trollope was born in Gloucestershire in 1943. Her father ran the City of London Building Society; her mother was a portrait painter. She was distantly related to Anthony Trollope and enjoyed his work – but said the connection had been of no professional help whatsoever. From Reigate County School for Girls, she won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where her tutors included J.R.R. Tolkien.

Not long after graduating, she married a banker, David Potter, settled in London and raised two daughters while working part-time as a teacher; she started writing historical novels in the evenings, under the pen name Caroline Harvey. When her marriage ended, she moved to the Cotswolds; it was her second husband, the dramatist Ian Curteis, who persuaded her to write about modern life. They divorced in 2001 and she returned to London in 2005.

Away from her writing, she supported Chelsea FC, and numerous charities. Asked on “Desert Island Discs” about the supposed triviality of her novels, she paraphrased Virginia Woolf: “It is a grave mistake to think there is more significance in great things than in little things.”