Hear the nickname “Queen of the Aga Saga” and you might expect an author who specialises in cookbooks or frothy stories set in the kitchen – but Joanna Trollope, who has died aged 82, was nothing of the sort, with books that tackled everything from divorce and empty-nest syndrome to bereavement and self-harm with compassion and honesty.
In her lifetime, the author behind bestselling novels including 1991’s The Rector’s Wife was lumped with the dismissive nickname by English author Terence Blacker, owing to her tales of love and betrayal set in Middle England.
Trollope was outspoken in her dislike of the moniker, and in an interview with The Independent in 2020 called it “patronising”. As to why it stuck, she blamed “idle journalism” in which writers regurgitated it mindlessly for years. “Needless to say it was created by a man,” she noted.
While Trollope’s books were domestic in their story and setting, they dealt in heavy themes with clarity and empathy. Fans admired her elegant prose and the extraordinary way she chronicled ordinary life.
She was especially attuned to social settings, grounding her stories in the lived realities of class, tradition and societal shifts; fellow novelist Fay Weldon once remarked that Trollope has a “gift for putting her finger on the problem of the times”. And as for the Agas, only two of the iconic range cookers ever actually featured in her 30 plus published novels.
This interview was far from the first time Trollope took aim at the label. At the Hay Festival in 2003, Trollope – alongside the late Jilly Cooper, master of the bonkbuster and fellow queen of popular fiction – said “the name itself indicates a provincial cosiness, and is patronising of the readers”.
She continued: “A lot of what I write into the books is bleak and challenging but I will be the Queen of the Aga saga to my dying day. It’s jolly annoying, but it is better than being the Queen of Hearts.”
In response to Trollope’s known disdain of the term, Blacker recanted his words and admitted that he felt “terribly guilty” about the way the nickname had stuck.
“The phrase just stuck I’m afraid,” said Blacker, author of the Ms Wiz children’s books. “It was early in her career and these tags are rather distorting and unfair. I feel rather remorseful about it now. I am very respectful of her as a writer. She has paid her dues. As she says, it's taken 20 years for her to become an overnight success.”
At the same event, Trollope had defended her friend Cooper from the same belittling that she herself faced from the literary elite. “I don’t know anyone better read than Jilly Cooper and no one more eager to pretend they are not.”
Her career as an author coincided with her mission not only for popular fictions like hers and Cooper’s to be taken seriously, but for fiction as a whole.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2020, Trollope expressed her impatience at older men who dismiss fiction as frivolous entertainment. “Men of my generation say to me: ‘Of course, my wife might read everything you’ve ever written, but I only read nonfiction,’” she said. “But if you wanted to know what the retreat from Moscow really felt like, you wouldn’t read a history of the Napoleonic wars – you’d read War and Peace.”
Fiction, she argued, “can be a physical confessional: when you’re within the covers of a book, you can admit to all kinds of things that you can’t otherwise. It’s also where you learn about the rest of human life and where you get your most profound experience of life – except from actually living it.”
In the wake of her death, fans of Trollope are paying tribute to the author and remembering her elegant and precise prose in books including The Village Affair (1989), Brother and Sister (2003), City of Friends (2017), and Mum & Dad (2020).
Trollope was born in Gloucestershire, a fifth-generation niece of English novelist and civil servant Anthony Trollope, she studied English at Oxford University before finding work at the Foreign Office and as a teacher, and then later becoming a full-time author.
Trollope rose to fame as an author with her novel The Rector’s Wife, which knocked leading authors including Jeffrey Archer off the top spot in 1991.
She was awarded a CBE for services to literature in 2019, and served as a judge for a number of prestigious literary awards. Later in life, she also spent much of her time volunteering in prisons and young offender institutions.
Of her legacy, Trollope told The Guardian in 2015: “I’d like to be remembered for something more general: that my novels were an enormous comfort to a lot of people who felt despair or jealousy or whatever it was. I want my books to say: ‘It’s OK, we all feel like that.’”
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