Joanna Trollope, the popular author behind a string of successful novels including The Rector’s Wife, has died aged 82.
In a statement, her daughters Louise and Antonia said: “Our beloved and inspirational mother Joanna Trollope has died peacefully at her Oxfordshire home, on 11 December, aged 82.”
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 became a full-time author.
Trollope’s father, Arthur, was away in India on war service when she was born in the family’s Cotswolds rectory in 1943, while her mother, Rosemary, was an artist and writer.
By the age of 14, Trollope could recite Jane Austen by heart and had already written her first novel, which was never published, but which she gave her children permission to read.
Her tales of romance and mystery in rural middle England later led to her being dubbed the “Queen of the Aga Saga”, a term she told The Independent in 2020 that she found “patronising”.
“Needless to say, it was created by a man,” she said, referring to English author Terence Blacker, who coined the term in 1992. She called it “idle journalism” and expressed disdain for the tabloid interviews that regurgitated it for years afterwards.
Her books, in fact, covered myriad serious issues, from divorce to bereavement, sibling rivalry, affairs, motherhood, betrayal and depression. She published more than 30 novels over four decades, initially writing under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey.
Her breakthrough came in the early Nineties with novels such as The Rector’s Wife, following this with bestsellers such as A Village Affair, Next of Kin, Other People’s Children and Marrying the Mistress.
Trollope received some comparisons to her hero, Austen, which made her uncomfortable. “The comparison to Jane Austen makes me fidget,” she once said. “There is a huge gulf between being great and being good.
“I know exactly which category I fall into and which she falls into. They are not the same. On a good day, I might be good. I think of my writing as contemporary accessible fiction and it really isn’t for me to add the qualifying adjectives.”
However, she was commissioned by publisher HarperCollins to write a contemporary retelling of Austen’s 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility as part of its “Austen Project” in 2013, which reimagined Austen’s six completed novels for modern readers.
She was married twice: first to city banker David Potter in 1966, with whom she had her two daughters. She married playwright and screenwriter Ian Curteis in 1985; they divorced in 2001.
Trollope told The Independent that she had a “mini-breakdown” after her second divorce and felt “impelled to flee” the Cotswolds for London: “The girls were away at school and I put the dogs and the toothbrush in the car and left. I just needed to get the hell out.”
She claimed to have been told that she was “imagining” the issues in her second marriage and that it was her fault: “I mean, quite a lot of professionals were saying this to me, as well as the ex-husband.
“And really, I think it was about this subject that fascinates me forever and ever, which is the way some people try to control others. It’s usually because of their own inadequacies that they try to control somebody who they feel is stronger and might elude them.”
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.
Her literary agent, James Gill, said: “It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of Joanna Trollope, one of our most cherished, acclaimed and widely enjoyed novelists.
“Joanna will be mourned by her children, grandchildren, family, her countless friends and, of course, her readers.”
She is survived by her two daughters, Louise and Antonia, and her grandchildren.
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