Joanna Trollope
Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox writer
Joanna Trollope Template:Post-nominals (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell; born 9 December 1943) is an English writer. She has also written under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey. Her novel Parson Harding's Daughter won in 1980 the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.<ref name="RoNAAwards">Template:Citation</ref>
Early life
Trollope was born on 9 December 1943 in her grandfather's rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, England, daughter of Rosemary Hodson and Arthur George Cecil Trollope.<ref name="BNS1960">Template:Citation</ref><ref name="IWiWA&W">Template:Citation</ref> Her father was an Oxford University classics graduate who became head of a small building society. Her mother was an artist and writer.<ref name="Allardice">Template:Cite news</ref> Her father was away for war service in India when she was born; he returned when she was three. The family settled in Reigate, Surrey. Trollope has a younger brother and sister. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls,<ref name="Bedell">Template:Cite news</ref> gaining a scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1961. She read English.<ref name="Taylor">Template:Cite news Template:Subscription required</ref>
Her father was of the same family as the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope; she is his fifth-generation niece,<ref name="Quindy">Template:Cite news</ref> and is a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope. Of inheriting the name, she has said:
Career
From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. While a civil servant, she researched Eastern Europe and the relations between China and the developing world.<ref name="Times2005">Template:Cite news Template:Subscription required</ref> 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."<ref name="Allardice" /> Encouraged by her second husband, Ian Curteis, she switched to the contemporary fiction for which she has become known.<ref name="Das">Template:Cite news</ref> The Choir, published in 1987, was her first contemporary novel.<ref name="Quindy" /> The Rector's Wife, published in 1991, displaced Jeffrey 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."<ref name="Allardice" /> In 1992, only Jilly Cooper's Polo and Archer's As the Crow Flies were stronger paperback bestsellers. "I think my books are just the dear old traditional novel making a quiet comeback", she told Geraldine Bedell in a 1993 interview for The Independent on Sunday.<ref name="Bedell" />
Often described as Aga sagas, for their rural themes, only two of Trollope's novels (by 2006) actually feature an Aga.<ref name="Allardice" /> The term's entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009) states that "by no means all her work fits the generally comforting implications of the label".<ref name="Birch" /> Rejecting the label as not being accurate, Trollope told Lisa Allardice, writing for The Guardian in 2006: "Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak. It's all rather patronising isn't it?"<ref name="Allardice" /> 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."<ref name="Allardice" /> Terence Blacker, who coined the term for Trollope's fiction in Publishing News in 1992,<ref name="Birch">Template:Cite book</ref> admitted a decade later that he "felt terribly guilty" for lumbering Trollope with the phrase.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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."<ref name="Bedell" />
In 2009, she donated the short story The 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.<ref>Ox-Tales Template:Webarchive, Oxfam, UK.</ref> She has written the first novel in Harper Collins updating of the Jane Austen canon, The Austen Project. Her version of "Sense and Sensibility" was published in October 2013 with limited success.
An adaptation of The Rector's Wife (1994), produced for Channel 4, starred Lindsay Duncan and Ronald Pickup.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The Choir, adapted by Ian Curteis, was a five-episode BBC television miniseries in 1995. It starred Jane Asher and James Fox.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Of her other novels, A Village Affair and Other People's Children have also been adapted for television.<ref name="Quindy" />
Reviews
A Spanish Lover: In The 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. ″<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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.″<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Friday Nights: Heather Thompson of The Guardian called Friday Nights "a light but insightful look at a rather conventional cast of characters."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Charlie Lee-Potter, in an article for The Independent, wrote that Brother & Sister: Template:Blockquote
Personal life
On 14 May 1966,<ref name="IWiWA&W" /> Trollope married a city banker, David Roger William Potter; the couple had two daughters, Louise and Antonia, divorcing in 1983.<ref name="BNS1960" /><ref name="Das" /> In 1985, she married the television dramatist Ian Curteis and became a stepmother of his two sons; she and Curteis divorced in 2001. After her second divorce, Trollope moved to West London.<ref name="Taylor" /> She is a grandmother.<ref name="Allardice" /><ref>Interview With Joanna Trollope, Readers Read</ref>
Trollope appeared on a 1994 edition of Desert Island Discs. Trollope 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", paraphrasing Virginia Woolf.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Works
As Joanna Trollope
Source:<ref name="JoannaTrollopeFF">Template:Citation</ref>
- Some of Joanna Trollope's historical novels are re-edited as Caroline Harvey**
Historical novels
- Eliza Stanhope (1978)
- Parson Harding's Daughter (1979)**
- Leaves from the Valley (1980)**
- The City of Gems (1981)**
- The Steps of the Sun (1983)**
- The Taverner's Place (1986)**
The Austen Project
- Sense & Sensibility (2013)
Other novels
- The Choir (1988)
- A Village Affair (1989)
- A Passionate Man (1990)
- The Rector's Wife (1991)
- The Men and the Girls (1992)
- A Spanish Lover (1993)
- The Best of Friends (1998)
- Next of Kin (1996)
- Other People's Children (1998)
- Marrying the Mistress (2000)
- Girl from the South (2002)
- Brother and Sister (2004)
- Second Honeymoon (2006)
- Friday Nights (2007)
- The Other Family (2010)
- Daughters-in-Law (2011)
- The Soldier's Wife (2012)
- Balancing Act (2014)
- City of Friends (2017)
- An Unsuitable Match (2018)
- Mum & Dad (2020)
Non-fiction
- Britannia's Daughters: Women of the British Empire (1983)
As Caroline Harvey
Source:<ref name="CarolineHarveyFF">Template:Citation</ref>
Legacy Saga
- Legacy of Love (1983)
- A Second Legacy (1993)
Historical novels
- A Castle in Italy (1993)
- The Brass Dolphin (1997)
See also
References
External links
- biography, bibliography, extracts and interviews.
Interviews
- Joanna Trollope discusses The Rector's Wife on the BBC World Book Club
- Interview with Ramona Koval on ABC Radio National's The Book Show about her book Friday Nights.
- Interview with Jami Edwards, April 1999, BookReporter.com
Metadata
- Joanna Trollope at Random House Australia
- 1943 births
- Living people
- 20th-century English novelists
- 21st-century English novelists
- English women novelists
- 20th-century English women writers
- 21st-century English women writers
- British women romantic fiction writers
- People from Minchinhampton
- Alumni of St Hugh's College, Oxford
- RoNA Award winners
- Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
- Pseudonymous women writers
- 20th-century pseudonymous writers
- 21st-century pseudonymous writers
- 20th-century British women novelists
- 21st-century British women novelists
- Writers from Gloucestershire
- Writers from Surrey
- People from Reigate